The Moonshine Apprentice

Brandy that tastes like the fruit.

Fruit is harder to distill than sugar or grain. It spoils fast, it makes methanol, and the aroma you paid for can end up in the wrong jar. This book shows you what to do about all three, and it tells you why each step works, so when a batch goes sideways you can work out what happened.

One batch, from the fruit to the bottle.
You follow one apple brandy through the whole book. You pick the fruit, build the must, ferment it clean, run the pot still, make your cuts in small numbered jars, rest it, oak part of it, blend it, and proof it down in steps. The technique chapters keep coming back to that batch, with typical figures, so you can see what each decision does.

Inside are 99 recipes:
- 12 apple brandies, including Calvados-style, Somerset-style, and applejack-style
- 8 pear and quince brandies, including Williams pear eau de vie
- 9 plum brandies, including slivovitz-style, quetsch-style, and mirabelle-style
- 7 cherry brandies, including kirsch-style
- 8 apricot, peach, and nectarine brandies, including pálinka-style
- 12 grape brandies, including Cognac-style, Armagnac-style, Jerez-style, and pisco-style
- 8 pomace and lees brandies, including marc-style, grappa-style, and tsipouro-style
- 12 berry brandies and geists, including raspberry, blackberry, and black currant
- 9 tropical and other fruit brandies, from mango and pineapple to fig and persimmon
- 6 brandies from canned, frozen, and dried fruit
- 8 distilled liqueurs, including maraschino-style and triple sec-style

Where a tradition does something this book doesn't, the recipe tells you what and why.

You'll also learn:
- Where methanol comes from, how to keep it low, and what home equipment can't tell you
- How to handle stone fruit to keep cyanide and ethyl carbamate down
- How to measure pH, acid, and sugar, and correct a must before the yeast goes in
- How to make a geist from low-sugar fruit like raspberries and black currants
- How to work with pomace, how freeze concentration really works, and what it can't do
- How to rest eau de vie in glass, age brandy on oak, and run a small solera
- How to blend, proof, sweeten, and bottle, with the math worked out

The back of the book has proofing tables, fruit tables, a fix-it guide, a fruit season calendar, a batch log, a glossary, and every rule of thumb in one place.

Whether this is your first fruit run or you've been making brandy for years, you get honest numbers, plain explanations, and the reason behind every step.

Part of The Moonshine Apprentice series.