[Uncle Lemon]

I make mostly fruit brandys. Here is my recipe and full process:

First, select the best, ripest fruit. The better the fruit, the better the wine, the better the brandy. Cut out any brown spots or other discoloration. If you wouldn’t eat it, don’t ferment it. It takes about seven pounds of cleaned fruit to make a gallon of puree. I cut my fruit up into chunks and fill my Ninja blender up, add some pectin and puree it. I let it set out for 24 hours for the pectin to work, then I freeze it. This is a two-pronged approach to extracting all the juices and sugars from the pulp. Pectin breaks down the fibers in the cell walls and frees up juice. Freezing expands the water in the fruit, which ruptures the cell walls and frees up juice. Freezing also allows me to procrastinate on an Olympic level. I’ll give you this recipe in ratios so you can make as much or as little as you want.
The recipe is one part fruit puree to two parts water and 2.5 pounds of cane sugar per gallon of mash. I have eight gallon fermenters and do six in each. I put two gallons of fruit puree, add 12.5 pounds of sugar and stir it in, then get a gallon of water up to 200°F and stir it in until all sugar is dissolved and let it set for 30 minutes. Then I top it up to six gallons with cool water. I let it cool down to 80°F and pitch my yeast. I use Lalvin K1-V1116 for fruits. I don’t use yeast nutrients or tannins. The fermentation goes fourteen days and gives you an ABV of about 16- 18%. When the fermentation is finished, let it settle for a week and siphon it off into clean, sanitized fermenters and let it settle for a month, siphon it off, then another month and siphon. Now your wine is perfectly or almost perfectly clarified and ready to run. I do twelve gallon batches, which ends up being about ten gallons of wine. I reserve a gallon and a half of the wine and run the rest. I get about a gallon and a half of 120- 140 proof booze from that. I blend all of the booze together in a carboy and age it with un-toasted white oak chips for two to three months. Then I siphon off the reserved wine one last time and blend it with the aged booze. Then I drink it. Yes, that is about five to six months total time from blender to belly. It’s well worth it, though. You can cut the time down by settling for just a week and running it. But you do have to settle the wine you reserve before you blend it, because it will end up with yeast sediment on the bottom of the bottles. This will make it taste like shit over time. And you don’t have to blend it. You can just run the whole batch of wine and have straight booze if you want. But if you do the long process, you’ll be blown away by the flavor.

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