On the Internet, you can find many recipes that suggest using cognac or brandy as the basis for making apricot brandy, but this is fundamentally wrong.
Real fruit brandy is made only by fermenting apricot juice, followed by distillation.
They also make apricots: mash and moonshine, liquor, liqueurs, tinctures, wine, syrup
Tips before starting
The apricot should be ripe and sweet (this is important).
You do not need to wash the apricot otherwise you will wash off the wild yeast.
Braga should be placed in a warm and bright place, but make sure that direct sunlight does not fall on the mash.
If you make brandy with a minimum amount of sugar, expect that with 60 liters of mash and 1 kg of sugar, the output of the final product will be about 4-5 liters, with a strength of 40%.
Apricot brandy recipe
Ingredients
Ripe apricots – a bucket of 12 liters
Sugar syrup – 1 kg of sugar per 1 liter of water
Water – by method
Sugar – according to the method
Wine yeast (if washed apricots) – dilute according to package instructions
Method of preparation
We clean the apricots, cut off the damaged areas, cut out the worms and remove the seeds.
We crush the resulting mass with our hands or a wooden crush until a homogeneous mass.
Pour three liters of water, pour sugar syrup, cover tightly with gauze and send to a warm place for a couple of days.
If you washed the apricots before peeling, you will need to add yeast. Whisk recommends using wine yeast, as others, such as baker’s or turbo yeast, can give a strong moonshine flavor instead of the rich taste of the original product, or vice versa, too clean taste due to rapid fermentation, again without the taste of apricots.
After two or three days, when our bulk will ferment, you can add another 9 liters of water and 2 kg of sugar. We put it under a water seal and leave it until the wort is completely fermented (the process is over when the “gurgling” disappears).
Now carefully drain the wort and carefully squeeze the pulp into the distillation cube. For the first time, we drive at maximum speed to dryness, that is, until there is alcohol in the stream.
We make the second stage fractional. Carefully – drop by drop we select the heads.
We select the body to a fortress in a jet of 45-50 degrees. Tails can be collected in a separate bowl, and then added to the next stage.
The resulting distillate is diluted to 40-45 degrees.
As a result, after two hauls and sorting, we will get about 3 liters of fragrant brandy.
Whisk advises letting the brandy rest in glassware for at least 3 weeks. During this time, the alcohol stabilizes to taste, the whole aroma will be revealed.
As a separate experiment, you can add oak chips or dice to give the drink a more complete look.
Alternative Apricot Brandy Recipe
Ingredients
Apricots – 6 kg
Water – by method
Sugar – according to the method
Method of preparation
We do not wash apricots, we sort them out from rot, we free them from the stone.
Then, in a large bowl, we knead everything with clean hands to a state of porridge, you can also use a crush.
Add 1 liter of warm water for better fermentation. We cover with a cloth, we tie it (to prevent the penetration of violators – midges and other flying-crawling brethren).
We leave for 3 days, stirring 2 times a day, we wait until it plays on its own sugar.
Pour 20 liters of warm sugar syrup into a 9 l container (proportion 1 to 1). And – for a water seal. By evening it should start gurgling.
As soon as the apricot settles, and the gurgling under the water seal stops, it is necessary to carefully drain the liquid from the sediment and send it for distillation.
Relevance: 04.09.2019
Tags: Brandy and Cognac, Brandy Recipes