Blueberry Brandy Attempt

FloridaCracker

I ended up with about 600 pounds of blueberries that I had to do something with in a hurry so this is what I did:

Put about 300# of them in a 55 gallon drum and macerated them the best that I could with a large paint stirrer. Added water until almost full. I didn't have any wine or champagne yeast so I used the only thing I had; Red Star dried active baker's yeast. I know this isn't recommended but it was that or feed the berries to the cows. Ferment started almost immediately as I am sure that there was a good amount of wild yeast already on the berries.

After 5 days a lot of the floating stuff has a lot of "growth" on it. I have no idea how much of the pulp is floating but I would guess a good deal of it. I'm a little worried that this crap on the top will ruin the stuff below. Never done wine or brandy before. Would like to distill it out when it is finished.

Suggestions?

grim

Ladle off the funk and punch the cap down so it stays moist and doesn't crust up. You might need to do this every day.

grim

Can't tell from the photo but it might just be yeast colonies.

Smaug

Do you smell or taste alcohol? Or a slight twang?

Kapea

I'd say just keep punching down the cap several times a day and run it as soon as any sign of fermentation ceases.

From several sources on the interwebs it appears blueberries contain around 10% sugar in the form of fructose and glucose, so you've got around 30 pounds of sugar in there for the yeast to ferment. Along with a shitload of tannins from the skins, (much like red grapes).

I think you're going to end up with several gallons of very tastey blueberry eau de vie.

punkin

That looks like mold, i'd be scooping the bulk of it off, and next time as everyone says, punch down the fruit every day or two and stir it in with a mash paddle.

FloridaCracker

@Smaug said: Do you smell or taste alcohol? Or a slight twang?

Definitely a wine smell with twang. I will go out and punch down the cap.

grim

How is it looking?

FloridaCracker

Punched the cap down again yesterday. The soup underneath is definitely getting thinner. If I wasn't so damned busy with this year's harvest ( my job) I would know more. Been 16 hour days here for weeks with a few more to go. I would have put this one off but it was kind of dumped on me unexpected and I didn't want to just feed the berries to the cows.

I was originally going to give them to Cotherman but he was in KY at the time and I had no place to store them.

CothermanDistilling

I would like to have macerated some in neutral, then distilled and re-fermented the sugary backset in something... our 2L glass prototyping still for Gin arrives today, will do a blueberry after all the other botanicals for the library...

FloridaCracker

Well, THAT was a colossal waste of time. Strained out enough for a strip run and knew something was up when the boiler temp hit 199 before any drips came out. Pulled off 150ml of what I thought were fores. Cloudy. Never had cloudy spirit before. I was able to watch the boiler through the glass and never had a puke so WTF.

Closed the drain on the parrot, put the alcoholmeter in and waited. Turned up the heat a little and a whopping 20abv started coming out. Turned off the unit and walked away. Well, at least I only have about 30 gallons more soup to throw out.

Guess there was hardly any sugar in them berries. Not enough to fool with anyway.

BUMMER!

Unsensibel

I wouldn't toss it out. It might be that it's not having a high alcohol content but you can at least strip it & then run again with a couple of plates to get some yield. It's going to be an expensive experiment but better than dumping it all!

I need to find a book that I have about fruit brandy that has a table about potential yield based on the different fruit types. I pretty much remember that the message about blueberries was to macerate & distill instead of ferment them.

Sunshine

well, maceration is common, but I have tasted brandy as well - it worked out fine. They are not easy to process, I guess.

grim

@FloridaCracker - How much water was added to top off? Wondering if because you started with low sugar, and added the top off water, that it had no chance. 300# of berries should be about a drum's worth, give or take, but that's based on whole berry.

FloridaCracker

@grim said: FloridaCracker - How much water was added to top off? Wondering if because you started with low sugar, and added the top off water, that it had no chance. 300# of berries should be about a drum's worth, give or take, but that's based on whole berry.

Whole berries were used and enough water added to help the pulverizing process. Maybe 15-20 gallons? All I can say is that I didn't even remotely like the smell of what was coming out of the parrot. Even if it was 90abv I wouldn't drink it. Still smelled like fermenting fruit and not in a good way. The distillate almost had a "soapy" smell. Kinda like a bad fruit pie with Dawn added to the ingredients.

Unsensibel

Based on the table that I have, 55 gal hold about 200 L. Blueberries have between 4 and 6 % mas sugars. That's roughly 17.5 - 26.5 lbs sugar resulting in a total alcohol yield of 1.1 - 1.7 gal for the total run

FloridaCracker

@Unsensibel said: Based on the table that I have, 55 gal hold about 200 L. Blueberries have between 4 and 6 % mas sugars. That's roughly 17.5 - 26.5 lbs sugar resulting in a total alcohol yield of 1.1 - 1.7 gal for the total run

Those numbers are probably right. VERY small amount of alcohol for such a large ferment. Oh well, it was a nice experiment and if I want anything blueberry flavored in the future I will just soak some in a neutral or rum (the easy way). I'm not a real big fan of fruit flavored liquor anyway but since I had the berries I thought that I would at least try.