Calvados: 2 recipes at home from apples and pears

Making Calvados at home is an unattainable thing. Like cognac, armagnac or the same tequila, this drink has strict geographical and raw material restrictions, enshrined at the legislative level.

Therefore, Vzboltay will tell you how to make apple or apple-pear brandy at home, whose production technology will be as close as possible to Normandy counterparts.

Learn more about Calvados.

Read before starting

For the sake of convenience of presentation, the drinks offered to your attention will still be held under the generally accepted name “homemade Calvados”. Let’s start with a few caveats that will help you avoid outright profanity and bring your homemade Calvados as close to French standards as possible.

First things first, immediately give up the tempting idea of ​​infusing vodka, alcohol or moonshine on crushed apples. Like it or not, but Calvados is, after all, brandy, respectively, it requires mandatory distillation of the original fruit raw material.

If the infusion option is close to your heart, we recommend these links: liqueurs, liqueurs and tinctures.

Further, keep in mind that it is completely unacceptable to cook Calvados according to the red scheme. That is, apple mash for Calvados (as well as apple-pear) should in no case be prepared with cultivated yeast, and also with the addition of sugar.

As you understand, this circumstance also does not allow making Calvados from apple pomace (by the way, the practical Normans with waste pomace act in a very original way: they dry it and sell it to cosmetics manufacturers).

If you, based on the speed and higher productivity of the red scheme, decide to ignore our advice, you will get an ordinary, although not without pleasantness, moonshine from apples.

Calvados, on the other hand, is made exclusively from apple juice fermented according to the white scheme, i.e., with natural wild yeast.

And finally, given the unofficial name of the drink – apple cognac – Calvados must be aged in oak barrels for at least two years. Otherwise, at the output you will get the same apple brandy of the moonshine class, though it is of better quality than the distillate from the pomace.

homemade apple calvados recipe

This simple recipe will allow you to make drinks that are reminiscent of Calvados such as the famous Calvados Pays d’Auge and the slightly less prestigious AOC calvados.

Calvados must be prepared from pure juice without any third-party additives. In fact, we are talking about non-carbonated cider.

It is very desirable that the apples are small and have a noticeable aroma. At the same time, the fruits must be plucked from the tree, i.e., remain slightly unripe.

Having picked up the desired combination of different varieties of apples, leave the fruits in a warm place for a couple of days for final ripening.

Then, in no case do I wash the fruit (otherwise you will destroy the wild yeast on the peel), chop them and send them under the press; if the amount of work to be done is not particularly large-scale, you can use a regular juicer.

Leave the resulting juice in a container covered with gauze, and hold the cake in warm water for a day.

After that, squeeze the apple mass, and pour the resulting liquid into the juice; it is important that it does not exceed 20% of the total volume.

When the wort begins to ferment, remove the foam from it and place it in a dry, dark place, where it should be under a water seal at a temperature of 22-25°C.

After 3-6 days, when the cider finally calms down, carefully remove it from the sediment and send it to distillation.

Calvados pear

To be precise, we will talk about the preparation of an apple-pear drink, since pure pear Calvados simply does not exist in nature.

In general, the technology of its production does not actually differ from the classical one. However, there are several nuances that we are going to tell you about.

First: apple-pear brandy can only be made within the AOC calvados and Calvados Domfrontais standards, but in both cases a single column distillation is used. Accordingly, if you resort to double distillation, then move somewhat away from the canon.

Second: pears used to make a drink are equated with sour apples, so they must be with a noticeable sourness. Thus, when selecting fruits for making apple-pear cider, you can replace 20% of sour apples with the same amount of pears, which is acceptable under the AOC calvados standard, or do a la Calvados Domfrontais standard, replacing sour and some bittersweet apple fruits with pears, which will account for 30 to 50% of the total amount of fruit.

And thirdly: if you want to do everything according to science, prepare separately apple and pear cider, distill them and mix the resulting spirits in the proportion you want.

Also made from pears: liqueurs, fillings, cider

How many times to distill Calvados

The recipe at home, and not only it, implies two possibilities. The first is, as in the case of the AOC calvados standard, to carry out a continuous single distillation by means of a vertical column distiller.

A more acceptable second possibility for us is a double distillation carried out in an ordinary moonshine unit (although, ideally, for the double distillation of drinks of the Calvados Pays d’Auge category, Charente-type copper “cognac” alambicas are used).

As a result of primary distillation, a 25-30 degree raw alcohol is obtained, which is entirely used for re-processing.

Secondary distillation of Calvados involves the separation of the resulting alcohol into fractions.

First, 5-8% of the “head” is discarded.

Then the “body” is selected, which will become the future Calvados.

The starting point for the tail fraction should be the drop in the strength of the output product below the 40 degree mark.

Unlike the “head”, the “tails” can be stored for later to be added to new cider just before it is distilled.

The middle fraction should be diluted with distilled water to the desired strength (from forty revolutions and above), and then come to grips with the exposure of the resulting alcohol.

Keeping the drink and subsequent cleaning of Calvados at home

The first step in finishing your apple brandy is preparing the Calvados cask (needless to say, the cask must be oak).

If you are dealing with a new container, it must be steamed, soaked in cold water, then rinsed with a 20-degree alcohol solution and steamed again.

In this way, you will increase the water resistance of the barrel, disinfect it and rid the wood of excess tannins.

Then, following the example of the Normandy distillers, the container should be burned from the inside, but this, frankly, is not for everybody.

To turn apple brandy into calvados, it must be in the barrel for at least two years.

If you have steel nerves and iron endurance, the term can be extended indefinitely. At the same time, after two years of aging, the distillate should be poured into an older container so that its flavor and aroma bouquet acquires the calm versatility inherent in noble drinks.

In the case of small batches of young brandy, it is allowed to insist in glass containers on oak chips. If the resulting drink seemed cloudy to you, it can be cleaned by straining through a gauze-cotton filter.

popular brands of calvados

Relevance: 21.11.2016

Tags: brandy and cognac