Braga from apples for moonshine at home

After sugar, apple moonshine is the most common in the countries of the former Soviet Union. Apparently, large yields of this fruit are affecting. In 2014, it was so strong that people literally did not know what to do with so many apples. Our tips and recipes would come in handy. So, we are preparing apple mash for moonshine.

This year’s apple crops are impressive in places. In any case, they cannot be compared with last year’s or this year’s plum brand – many people cooked plum brandy according to our recipe this fall. The popularity of apple moonshine is also due to the simple technology of its production, which a novice moonshiner can master without any problems.

At its core, apple moonshine is not much different from Calvados, but comparing them, of course, would be a mistake. I would say this: every Calvados is an apple moonshine, but not every apple moonshine is a Calvados. A noble, aged drink from Normandy is made from the purest cider, usually aged for six months. What am I telling you, read this article. For moonshine, thick mash with cake is often prepared and with cake and distilled.

The resulting product is more aromatic than aged Calvados (this one acquires more cognac taste and smell with aging) and is excellent for further refinement. It is logical that it will be possible to prepare apple tincture or liquor from it. Braga from apple juice is prepared very simply and with minimal financial costs, provided that you got the apples, as they say, “on the ball.” By the way, apples make good drinking mash, which is quite suitable for cider.

Recipe for apple mash for moonshine

This is the most common recipe for apple mash. It is not very elegant and very simple, but that does not mean that it is bad. Our moonshiners have tried it for a long time and came to the conclusion that this is the best option for beginners and not only.

• 30 kg ripe apples (10 l crushed)
• 10-20 L of water
• 2-4 kg sugar
• 100 g dry yeast

Preparation of apple mash

1. Rinse the apples, remove the cuttings and cut into small pieces. Remove the core with bones and be sure to cut off the rotten places.
2. After that, the apples need to be crushed to a homogeneous mass, but not mashed – it will be difficult to distill a too dense, homogeneous must without a steam generator. For grinding, you can use anything: a blender, a special crusher, a coarse grater, a meat grinder or a construction mixer. The result should be about 10 liters of gruel.

3. It’s time to decide on the amount of sugar. Try the juice and if it is very sour, which is typical for winter varieties of apples, feel free to take 4 kg of sugar. If there is already enough sugar in the juice, take less, at your discretion. For 1 kg of sugar in the wort, you need to add 5 liters of water. For example, let’s take sour apples, which means 4 kg of sugar.

4. Add 18 liters of clean, cold water to the wort and mix well. From the remaining 2 liters and 4 kg of sugar, cook sugar syrup. You can use inverted (about syrups available written in this article). Cool the syrup to 30 ^оC and add to the wort, then mix it well again.

Wild yeast is undesirable in this case – there is a high risk of souring due to oilcake. You can take ordinary dry bakers, such as Saf Moment or Saf Levure. They quickly ferment the wort, but an unpleasant “mash” smell may appear. It is better to take ordinary wine and ferment on them.

Before adding yeast, they need to be prepared: pour into warm, 30-35 ^оC, water in a ratio of 1:10 and let stand warm for 10-20 minutes. Now add the prepared yeast to the mash and mix well.

Fermentation of apple mash

Apple mash ferments from 6 to 21 days. The term depends on the temperature regime and the type of yeast cultures. Baker’s yeast under normal conditions ferment for 8-10 days. At the same time, it is not necessary to install a water seal on the container in which fermentation takes place (if it is a milk can, then you can simply cover it with a lid on top, leaving a small gap to remove carbon dioxide). For wine yeast, it is better to follow all the rules of winemaking and install a water seal. With them, the mash will ferment for up to 3 weeks.

In the process of fermentation, a dense cap of cake will form on the surface – it must be periodically knocked down so as not to turn sour. When the cake settles to the bottom, the mash will lighten up and sugar will no longer be felt in it (even slightly bitter), which means you can prepare for distillation – fermentation is over. Apple mash is distilled directly with cake. Before that, you can put it on the balcony / street for the night, hold it in the cold.

It was the simplest recipe for making apple mash. Here the wort was fermented “in red”, that is, with cake. The method “in white”, that is, on pure juice, corresponds to the technology of making homemade cider, and, consequently, Calvados. So read related articles. It is believed that moonshine from clarified apple juice is much better. So it is, while with wild yeast the drink turns out to be more aromatic.

Distillation of apple mash

This will be discussed in the next article, but I will tell you in general terms. Of course, it is best to distill thick mash with steam so that the pulp does not burn. But you can drive with a conventional distiller. First, slowly heat the cube, and only then bring it to the desired temperature. We do the first distillation “dry”, without separation into fractions. We select while there is at least some hint of alcohol in the stream, most often they drive up to 5% (all aromatic substances are in the tails). The second time we drive fractionally: we take 1 ml of heads from each 50 liter of mash (possibly more, up to 70 ml, we focus on the smell) and drive until there is 40% alcohol by volume in the stream. Next we take the tails.

To enhance the aroma of the final product, between distillations, CC (raw alcohol) can be insisted on fresh apples for a couple of days, and then fractionally distilled. In the end, you will get a very aromatic drink with a strength of 60-88%. It can be thinned up to 40-50% and allowed to rest for a couple of weeks before tasting. You can also insist the resulting moonshine in a barrel or on oak chips. But that, as they say, is a completely different story …