How to make moonshine from pears at home?

The harvest of pears this year is the most generous. They hang, poor fellows – sweet, tasty, filled with juice under the last autumn rays of the sun, and for nothing nobody needs them. Well, where do you put them? Jam, compote? Boring. Wine, cider? Hard. Tinctures or liqueurs? Where do you get so much alcohol! So what is the question – it’s time to drive one of the queens among fruit distillates, pear! Read the article – and you will learn how to make not a banal pear moonshine, but an excellent brandy, worthy of both aging for Calvados and thoughtful ingestion in its pure form!

What can I say, pure fruit distillates are a great weakness of your humble servant. Of course, the crazy empress of such drinks is homemade slivovitz. But home-made pear moonshine is also a person of clearly blue blood, a drink no less aromatic and interesting than, for example, an apple counterpart – it’s not without reason that the French keep such brandy for many years to get a delicious pear Calvados! Pear is considered one of the national drinks of the Czech Republic, it is very popular in Hungary and Slovakia, Poland, it is well done in Ukraine. In general, wherever there are pears, there is a place for a pear!

Making pear moonshine at home

Step One: Selecting Raw Materials

As one reasonable person said on the forum of moonshiners, the main problem of the pear is the variety of its varieties. From some pears, mash for moonshine turns out fragrant and rich, from others – watery and faded. For our business, the main thing is the smell, as well as for preparing, for example, pear tinctures, you need to select the most fragrant, most ripe fruits. We do not need wild game, which is actively used for the production of cider and wine – acid and tannins are not critical for mash. The sweeter the pear is, the greater the yield of moonshine will be, but we need to get not just sam, but a delicious distillate, so sweetness is secondary here.

So, according to many moonshiners, the best fruits for pear are autumn, fully ripe, fragrant and tasty. As for varieties, if there is a choice, we take Duchess, Williams, Bergamot, Lemonka, Bartlett and the like. Even carrion will do – only it must first be processed and washed. Rudolf Jelínek, a Czech firm, is said to produce a special gourmet pear called Oskeruša made exclusively from rotten fruit – you can experiment if you have your own garden.

Step two: preparing the wort

Of course, in order to make the perfect pear moonshine at home, you first need to make good pear wine – you can read exactly how in this article. On the other hand, it is not at all necessary to spend so much effort and time – after all, such wines are clarified for a very long time, and the mash can be made even unclear – the brandy will only be more aromatic!

The main problem of a pear is fibrousness, poor separability of juice. You can solve it in several ways:

• Boil a rich “compote” from pears – the high temperature will destroy the pectins and release the juice. The method is good because the less pectins – the less methyl alcohol in the final product, the cleaner and more harmless it is. And the bad thing is that our brandy will not have the aroma of fresh pear, but of pear jam – and these, you see, are still different aromas.
• Just cut the fruit, add some water and let it ferment for a few days, then squeeze out the juice. Fermentation also softens the pear and destroys the fibers, but squeezing the juice even in this case is still an occupation!
• Make mash using the “red” technology, grinding the pear into a puree. The best option for owners of devices with a steam-water jacket or a steam generator is that the resulting mash can be distilled directly with the pulp, from which the brandy will be most fragrant. But there will also be more methanol – you will have to select the head fractions with a vengeance. Also, according to this method, mashed potatoes can be fermented by diluting with water, and then simply drained from the pulp through a tube – during the fermentation process, the mash will become thinner, the solid parts will fall to the bottom in a layer.

About sugar. The more we add sugar to the mash, the more the pear becomes a sugar moonshine, and not a fruit brandy. But the less sugar, the lower the distillate yield, because the pears themselves contain not so much of it – about 15% for garden varieties. In the recipe below, sugar is not added – we will prepare pure pear brandy, this is the best option if you have a full garden of pears. If you want to save money, no one will forbid you to add sugar. Each kilogram will increase the yield by about 0.5 liters of AC, but it is not known how much flavor it will steal. The main thing to remember is that sugar should be taken no more than 20% of the total weight of fruits (1 kg per 5 kg of pears), and 4 liters of water should be added to each kg.

And another delicate issue – yeast. Khleboperarskie we dismiss immediately, if we do not want to get a village kosorylovka instead of elite brandy. We go to a wine shop and take either special alcohol, for fruit brews, or wine, for thick fruit wines, or cider. If there is no such store nearby, you don’t know how to use online stores or don’t want to spend money – you can put the brew on your own, that is, on wild yeast that lives on the pear itself. In this case, we will get less alcohol, and we will have to wait much longer, the mash can become moldy or sour at the most inopportune moment. But everything is natural.

Step three: brewing and fermentation.

With the proportions of pear mash for moonshine, everything is quite simple – ideally, this is 10 kg of fruit per 8-10 liters of water, + 4 liters of water per kilogram of sugar. Well, yeast – according to the instructions.

To make moonshine from pears of the elite category at home – almost real pear Calvados, instead of mash, you need to make cider right away – its recipe is here. But this, as they say, is a completely different story, everything will be much simpler with us.

1. We sort out the pears, remove the rotten and moldy areas, cut out the cores. If we make it with wild yeast, we don’t wash the fruits, in all other cases it won’t hurt to rinse with warm water.

Now it all depends on the method of preparing the mash that you chose in the previous section. If you chose the first one, add half the water to the pears, heat in a large saucepan and boil over low heat under the lid for an hour, then cool. If the second – just cut smaller. If the third – we crush the fruit with a construction mixer or puree it in any other convenient way.

2. Now our pear compote or puree needs to be diluted with the rest of the water and infected with yeast. If using store-bought, follow the instructions on their packaging. If wild – just leave the wort for a couple of days in a warm place, covering with gauze and stirring daily. You can, for fidelity, pour a couple of handfuls of raisins into the wort.
3. When there are signs of fermentation – a head of foam, a sour smell, gurgling – the wort must be deprived of air. In the first and third cases, we simply pour it into the fermenter and install a water seal or, in extreme cases, a glove. In the second case, if you have chosen fermentation with pure juice, first we squeeze the pears with a press, a plastic bag, thin rags – as it will.
4. Braga for moonshine from pears will ferment from 5 to 10 days on CKD and from 14 days to a month on wild yeast, depending on the temperature. The fermented mash must be removed from the sediment and pulp with a tube (if you have a steam generator, then we drive it right along with the remains of the fruit), after which it is advisable to let it stand in a cool place for another week or two and decant again – this way the moonshine turns out cleaner and in it has less unpleasant smell of boiled yeast.

Step four: primary distillation, intermediate refinement

Congratulations, our mash is ready! It’s time to proceed directly to the preparation of pear – according to the recipe, it, like all fruit brandies, is prepared in a conventional distiller using the potstill method, at the highest power. If your apparatus has a false bottom, a steam-water casing or a steam generator, it is better to distill along with the pulp, you can also add some chopped fresh pears to the mash for flavor. In other cases, we drive only liquid – pieces of pulp can burn to the bottom of the apparatus, which will hopelessly spoil the moonshine.

So, we distill the mash at maximum power, without selecting either heads or tails. We continue the selection until the raw alcohol begins to acquire an unpleasant aroma or up to 5-10 degrees in the stream. In general, everything is according to the standard scheme.

After the first run, the raw can be additionally flavored by insisting it, for example, on a dried pear or adding a couple of kilograms of fresh fruit to the jar – a week is enough! Infusion on a smoked pear also gives interesting results, but this is already an experimental method, for a start it is better to cook a simple pear according to the recipe.

Step Five: Redistillation

Read more about why re-distillation is needed and how it is done, read here. In general terms, we need to get rid of unnecessary impurities – volatile alcohols and esters (found in the “heads”) and fusel oils (live in the “tails”).

First you need to measure the strength of the raw alcohol obtained at the last stage and dilute it with clean water to 20-30 °. We start the race at low power. First, the head fractions will come out of the apparatus – you need to select about 5-10% of absolute alcohol, we continue the selection until the distillate has an unpleasant odor with notes of acetone, ammonia, turpentine and other delights. We pour out the heads or use them for domestic purposes.

When the heads are selected, the heating power can be slightly increased. We continue the selection of the body up to 40-30 degrees in the jet. After that, the power is reduced again. Tailings should also be sampled while they are still quite pleasantly scented and have a clear pear bouquet. We collect the rest of the tails in a separate container – they can be used in the next distillation, for example, sugar mash – to increase the strength, aromatization and increase the yield.

Exposure and refinement. How to drink pear?

Properly prepared homemade pear brandy is a delicious drink, organoleptically not inferior to a real Czech pear, unobtrusive, without extraneous tastes, with a bright aroma of fresh pear. Such schnapps goes well in its pure form – either warmed up in a wide glass, or slightly chilled, from piles. Of course, for the full disclosure of the bouquet, the resulting moonshine must be kept in a closed container in a cool place for at least two to three months, better – six months or more. Believe me, here “aging is worth the sheepskin” – after a while you will get a stunning, truly elite drink, ideal as an aperitif for meat and poultry dishes, fruits, desserts, perfectly revealed in cocktails.

The second option is to use a pear to prepare, for example, pear liqueurs or liqueurs, in this case, our moonshine will become an ideal raw material, give the tincture a particularly delicate aroma and emphasize the taste of fresh pears during their maceration. For this, moonshine is also desirable to preliminarily withstand a couple of months.

Well, the best method of refining is aging in a barrel! The solution for those who do not have a barrel is oak chips of medium roast, no more than 2-3 ten-centimeter chips per 3 liters of distillate – read in detail in this article how to prepare and use it. If homemade pear moonshine turned out to be of especially high quality, then oak wood will eventually turn it into something truly unique, the product will not be inferior to real pear Calvados! Drink aged pear in small sips, warmed up in a cognac glass, accompanied by a cigar and light unobtrusive snacks, enjoying an amazing, rich taste with hints of vanilla, chocolate, fruit, prunes and a delicate pear aroma!