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I can only find recipes for banana brandy for 30 pounds Im looking to make 5 gallons. How many pounds of bananas should I use for 5 gallons

Divide by 6.

Ouch

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While it may seem funny at first glance, I'm not sure how dividing by 6 will help you here.

Take a look at this thread, bshack, lots of good info about using bananas.
http://homedistiller.org/forum/viewtopi ... 38&t=58248

bshack618 wrote:I can only find recipes for banana brandy for 30 pounds Im looking to make 5 gallons. How many pounds of bananas should I use for 5 gallons

Hi bshack can you restate your question, please? You want to make 5 gallons of what? 5 gals of final product or 5 gals of must? How many gallons of "that" (must or brandy) was the original recipe for?

There's a hell of a lot of flavour in bananas.

When I used to make banana wine - I'm pretty sure it was 3lb / gallon (imperial) and there was loads of flavour in it.

It's all very well making wine out of grape juice or apple juice - but when you get to highly flavoured fruit, I'm thinking you need to use water and sugar to dilute the flavur a bit.

If you search the forum for bananas, there are a lot of failures reported. It seems to be quite difficult to get banana flavor into the heart cut. Adding sugar doesn't help.

The only banana spirit I've tasted, you wouldn't know was made out of banana if you hadn't seen the label.

That's the same with any fruit wine though Chris. When was the last time you tasted grapes in "Grape brandy" ?

I spent a zillion efforts trying to get peach wine to taste like shop bought "Peach wine" - ie peaches. Wasn't until I started distilling that I realised the damn flavour is put in Afterwards !

Pikey wrote:That's the same with any fruit wine though Chris. When was the last time you tasted grapes in "Grape brandy" ?

I spent a zillion efforts trying to get peach wine to taste like shop bought "Peach wine" - ie peaches. Wasn't until I started distilling that I realised the damn flavour is put in Afterwards !

My brandy tastes like the grapes it is made out of, so does the grappa made from the scraps, and my peach brandy tastes like peaches.

Fair enough - but Corvoisier for example, doesn't taste of grapes does it ? perhaps you can let us have a recipe please ?

My banana brandy tastes like 60# of bananas in a bottle.
No sugar and nothing subtle about it.

Courvoisier will taste like the grapes it is made from.
Mine tastes nothing like it because my grapes are very different, but the method I use is very similar; crush, ferment, press, double distill using the Cognac method. I would do a similar method for bananas, but one secret appears to be in using the banana's own enzymes to convert their starch when preparing them for fermenting. Mushing up ripe bananas with sugar and water is a common theme in reports of disappointing results and I'm sure is the method used by the distiller who's product I tasted. He wasn't there to talk to, but there were no signs that bananas were being over ripened on the premises and there were several 25kg bags of sugar in the distillery.

Same reason you don't use yellow bananas for banana bread. Flavor is in the mushy ones.

MichiganCornhusker wrote:My banana brandy tastes like 60# of bananas in a bottle.
No sugar and nothing subtle about it.

Ditto that. It can be done.

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I tried bananas twice with rum. I could smell the banana flavor coming out of the worm before the spirits came out, but very little or none of the 'nanner flavor made it into the product.
It's worth trying again though. I'd love to do a successful 'nanner rum.

Banana "flavor" is sensed thru the nose and not tasted on the tongue ... blend for the smell.