Cooking moonshine from apricots at home!

Apricot moonshine is perhaps the most popular fruit distillate in the world after grape. Brandy (schnapps, brandy) from apricots is made all over the world – from the Caucasus and the Middle East to the Balkans, Germany, the States. Many connoisseurs put a good, aged apricot moonshine even higher than vintage cognacs – only to get such an elite drink you need to make it right. How exactly? We read in the article!

Apricot – that fruit! Despite the fact that this fruit is reluctant to give juice and contains a lot of pectins, it is used with might and main for the preparation of a wide variety of alcohol – wines, liqueurs, liqueurs. But moonshine from apricots is best obtained at home – when distilled, the taste and aroma of the berries are concentrated, the fruits, even not very bright in themselves, are transformed into a stunning product that becomes especially thin and elegant after a long exposure. Today we will learn how to make apricot moonshine using the simplest recipe as an example, but with the nuances that will allow you to turn an ordinary fruit distillate into your own one-of-a-kind masterpiece!

Homemade moonshine from apricots – the main problems

Apricot is a tree of the “plum” genus, respectively, the main problem of this fruit for a winemaker and moonshiner is pectin, which is contained in excess in fruits. Pectin binds plant fibers, does not allow the juice to separate, makes the mash (and the distillate obtained from it) cloudy, and also promotes the formation of methyl alcohols, which are not needed at all in apricot brandy. Speaking about apricot wine, we briefly touched on this topic (by the way, any of the wine recipes given in this article is suitable for making mash – it will be ready after primary fermentation).

So, in order to extract juice faster, easier and in full, without leaving precious liquid in the squeezes, you can use the following methods:

• heating the wort to 60-70 degrees for 20-30 minutes;
• diffuse method: rough extraction, after which – infusion of the extraction in warm water for several hours (water in this case is taken in the amount indicated in the recipe);
• pectolytic enzymes – there are many of them, for example “DEPECTIL Clarification”, google will help you. After the enzyme treatment, the wort will again need to be heated. It would not be superfluous to mention here that the use of pectolytic enzymes can lead to an increase in methanol distillates, which is confirmed by laboratory studies of our and Western moonshiners.

There is one but – all three methods imply that the mash will ferment on a pure yeast culture – CKD, yeast for fruit wines, they are sold on the Internet. If you want to make mash in a simpler (and authentic, traditional) way, you can’t heat the fruits, just like washing them – unfortunate yeast-savages live there, terrible on the face, kind inside – they are quite able to ferment the wort. Moonshine from apricots without yeast takes longer to cook. Alcoholic and baker’s yeast is even easier and faster, but the resulting product will have a clear moonshine flavor, which is extremely difficult to get rid of. In general, the choice is yours.

Preparation of mash from apricots

The optimal, time-tested proportions for apricot moonshine without yeast and with them are as follows (revision dated 21.07.2019):

Tip # 1. Apricot moonshine without sugar is, of course, a noble thing, but a thankless one, since its yield is very small (an average of 500 ml of absolute alcohol from 10 kg of fruit). On the other hand, the more sugar, the more chances to get not apricot brandy, but sugar moonshine. Compromise: increase the initial density of the mash to 15% hydrometer, no more. Checked, and the output will be decent, and the taste will suffer minimally. And if you take high-quality dextrose or fructose instead of ordinary sucrose, manipulations with the yield will go completely unnoticed.

How to do it:

1. Prepare apricots: sort, cut off rotten and moldy parts, rinse thoroughly (do not wash if fermentation is with wild yeast). Cut the fruit in half and remove the pits, which can give a bitter almond flavor and contain prussic acid, a precursor to the carcinogenic ethyl carbamate, that is harmful to drinkers.
2. Grind the fruits in any suitable way for this: mash with your hands, finely chop, pass through a meat grinder, mash in a puree with a drill with a mixer attachment, a blender, or use a crusher of any design for this. The thinner the apricots are crushed, the more juice you will end up with and the more fragrant it will be.
3. Add 3/10 parts of water from the resulting volume of apricot puree. You should focus on the consistency of the mash – it should be sufficiently fluid (the consistency of liquid sour cream) so that it can be easily mixed and poured from one container to another. You can add more or less water, see here according to circumstances.
4. After dilution with water, take a sample of the juice to determine its sugar content and acidity. Add sugar: 0,5-1/10 of the resulting volume of apricot puree (before diluting it with water) or, more professionally and repeatable from year to year, up to 15% hydrometer (15 ^оBx by refractometer). It is not superfluous to measure the pH of the mash and, if necessary, lower it with citric acid, malic acid, tartaric acid, or a mixture of them to pH 3,5. Acidification is especially important for fermentation with wild yeast – sour mash is less susceptible to infection and ferments much better.

5. Pour the corrected juice with pulp into a fermentation container, filling it no more than ¾ of the total volume, add CKD, if any, cover the container with gauze or a clean cloth and place in a warm dark place for 2-5 days. After the start of fermentation (up to 24 hours for CKD and 1-2 days for DD), a dense cap of pulp will begin to form on the surface of the fermentation container – it must be regularly, at least twice a day, knocked down with intensive stirring for 5 minutes.
6. When the violent fermentation subsides a little, which usually occurs after 2-5 days (depending on the yeast and environmental conditions), install a water seal on the container and leave until the end of fermentation, preferably in a cool place with a temperature of up to +16 ^оC.
7. When the water seal stops bubbling, and the wort noticeably separates into three fractions (yeast sediment, juice, pulp cap), the mash can be distilled. On CKD, the full fermentation cycle usually lasts from 7 to 14 days, and on DD – up to 3-4 weeks. The finished mash will be sour, without traces of sugar, and when it is burned on foil, the aroma of caramel will be absent (this is how the readiness of mash is checked in Eastern Europe).

The first distillation of apricot moonshine

You will need any distillation apparatus operating in the mode of a conventional distiller. The presence of copper in the steam zone will be a big plus – the brandy will turn out to be tastier, more aromatic and less harmful to health (relevant for both distillations, during the second it is good to have copper in the distillation still). Distillation is carried out at the maximum temperature, with the maximum possible water supply – this is a general rule for all fruit brews. To prevent splashes from getting into the finished product, you can install a steamer in front of the refrigerator (Hungarians put pieces of old tiles on the bottom of the distillation cube – they work as a defoamer). The tank, of course, is not filled more than 2/3 of the volume.

The distillation is carried out almost to dryness – while the fruity smell is still observed in the tailings. If you are afraid of methyl alcohols, already at the first stage you can select a few heads, literally up to a stable stream of SS. As a result, we have a fragrant “low-alcohol” SS (Hungarian alszesz) with a strength of about 30%. Now he needs to give a few days to rest and overtake a second time fractionally, carefully dividing into fractions.

Tip # 4. If the moonshine after the first pasture turned out to be not fragrant enough, notes of fruits are not felt well in it – for the rest period, you can throw a few fresh apricots into the jar. Also, to give the future drink a light almond note, like Amaretto liqueur, raw alcohol can be infused on apricot pits – only 3-4 broken kernels per liter. With repeated distillation, the hydrocyanic acid contained in them will decompose to aromatic compounds. But be careful – not everyone likes the aroma of almonds.

Re-distillation and aging of apricot brandy

Re-distillation is necessary for any fruit moonshine. It is necessarily produced fractionally – with cutting off heads rich in volatile alcohols (methanol and the like), and tails containing fusel oils. Before distillation, the crude is diluted to 20 degrees, if necessary. The diluted liquid is poured into the tank, the heating is turned on at minimum power – the distillate should drip literally 1-2 drops per second.

Head fractions are taken in the amount of 5-10% of absolute alcohol in the SS. As soon as the dripping liquid has ceased to smell unpleasantly of acetone, the selection of the body can begin. “Heads” are not used, they can be poured out or used, for example, to disinfect equipment when brewing homemade beer.

When selecting the “heart” (Hung. középpárlat), the heat can be slightly increased. The selection continues up to about 50-60 degrees in the jet – until an unpleasantly smelling “turbidity” – tail fractions – drips from the device. They can also be driven almost dry and used the next time you make apricot brandy.

Tip # 5. When the strength of moonshine decreases and the “tails” are already on the way, it is better to remove the resulting middle fraction and substitute separate dishes under the refrigerator. Further, the selection continues literally by 200-300 ml – while the moonshine is not yet cloudy and has a pleasant aroma of apricots, it can be added to the body. Mixing should be carried out after the fact, after distillation, evaluating each collected fraction organoleptically.

Moonshine from apricots, medium fraction with a strength of 60-70%, ready! It will be possible to drink it after a week or two of rest in glassware, previously diluted with soft water to 40-45 degrees. Traditionally, apricot palinka is not aged in barrels because the oak clogs the delicate fruity aroma. Instead, the distillate is left for six months in a glass container in a cool, dark place. During this time, the tastes are smoothed out, the drink becomes harmonious and soft.

But sometimes, if the apricot brandy came out very fragrant, it is aged in oak barrels. In production, this is a short aging in huge (up to 1000 liters) oak tanks. At home, this can be done in a light or medium toasted cask, preferably already worked with another fruit or grain distillate. During aging, moonshine should be regularly tasted so as not to miss the moment when the delicate apricot flavor begins to be replaced by vanilla-cinnamon-nut-chocolate motifs of the barrel.

If you don’t have cooperage products, use their simple and cheap alternative – oak chips, I wrote about its properties and preparation in this article. Wood chips need to be put a little – one 10-cm chip per liter of moonshine, or even less, otherwise there is a risk of turning the drink into a “stool” (your obedient servant already has such a bitter experience), and keeping it longer, at least a couple of months, but necessarily with regular sampling.

So we learned how to drive moonshine out of apricots at home! As we can see, there is nothing supernatural in this, neither sophisticated equipment nor any virtuoso skills are needed – only desire and sincere love for the real elite of home drinks – fruit distillates!