Filtering Liqueurs

[The Baker]

The apricot liqueur I made nearly two years ago was too thick with fine pulp to strain.

When I made it I put the pulp through one of those sieves-with-a-handle
(‘mouli- something?’)
that are used to sieve and get the skins out of tomato cooked for sauce (ketchup).
Bad move, I think. The liqueur ended up as thick as tomato sauce and nothing seemed to work when I tried to filter it.

But I have looked at it again and it seemed to have separated somewhat, the pulp from the liquid.
So I strained and squeezed it through some stuff that is a bit like mosquito netting, finer and soft almost like cloth but really strong, dunno what it is or even how I came by it, it was in the shed....
Out of something under 18 litres in that thicker batch I got about 7 litres of pulp. (!!!)

Anyway I took that pulp, with its fruit and sugar and alcohol, and divided it amongst three lots of fruit wash I have fermenting; half sugar-and-water and half cooked apple. They're about forty litres each so the alcohol in the pulp will not be enough to affect the wash.
Waste not, want not?!

The remaining apricot liqueur was still pretty gelid so I added some pectinase; at least 100 grams for a bit under 30 litres in total. Some of the pectinase was old but anyway I am not sure whether it made a difference or not; I think maybe it helped but not much at all.
There seemed to be a bit more liquid near the top of the jars.

I left the lids off awhile because the alcohol I made then was not nearly as good as the vodka I am getting now from the pot still; that helped get rid of a bit of congener smell.
I have put in some of the good new spirit to bring the alcohol content up a bit,
also more again to adjust the alcohol level because of the apricot nectar I used to enhance the flavour.

So all that increased the liquid content (as against the pulp/jelly) and made it easier to filter again.

It would have been completely useless to try to filter this through, say, coffee filters.
Too much and too gelid.

I got a couple of clear plastic storage containers, maybe 2’6” x 1’6”.
(Maybe 800 mm x 500 mm? My metric is shaky.)
And put them on the floor side by side, then folded a piece of aluminium foil over the join so as not to spill liquid on the floor.
Then laid a bread crate over them, just to be a support for the main part of the business.
Into that I placed a similar crate maybe two feet square (660 mm?) with lowish sides and holes in the bottom, to hold the filter.
Which was a damp bed sheet. Folded so as not to be too wide to be awkward to handle.

Poured the liqueur onto the sheet, the sides of which were held up by the supporting crate.
Every twenty minutes or so I dragged the sheet along in its crate (even though there was still liquid on it...) to expose a clean surface to the liqueur I kept on adding.
And all this jelly stuff remained on the sheet, leaving a nice, normal, liquid liqueur in the containers underneath.

I tasted a commercial apricot brandy I had on the shelf and they have used a lot of apricot kernels so I will do that, too. It will improve the flavour of the liqueur.
I had kept a lot of the kernels for amaretto which I will be making soon.