Apple Brandy

Today I had a first go of creating some liquor. A practice go before I get into making any gin. My starting point was some cider as my 'wash'. I used 1.5l of it for my stripping run.

I labelled a number of jars to collect the different fractions from my run and filled and assembled my still in alembic mode (without the column).

And off we go!

I discarded the first 10-15ml of foreshots but collected another 6 jars until the alcohol level got down to 3%, leaving me with 6 jars to blend.

I really should have had another one or more bottles of cider to do more stripping runs, as, for my spirit run, I had just 295ml to distill.

I discarded the first 10ml or so of heads and kept going with 4 other jars, discarding the tails in the last after I measured the 4th Jar at 26% ABV.

Blending my remaining 3 jars left me with about 125ml of liquor at 43% alcohol.

I took a tiny bit and added the same volume again of water. Very sweet and flavoursome. Now I need to barrel-age it... or rather add a bit of oak to it for a while... oak chips now on order.

Thumbs up for a first attempt, even though the yield is so small. All good practice for the perfect gin to come.