does any one have a tried and true recipe like great grandfather or grandfather use to make, an old recipe. Someone told me they had an aquaintance (but wouldn't share the recipe, took it to the grave) he added dried fruit to the cider such as dates, raisins, pineapple and after racking made fruit cakes from the dried fruit to eat with his hard cider. any suggestions would be appreciated.
apple jack
Oct 28, 2003
5 Replies
True "apple jack" is made by freeze-distilling [hard] apple cider in the winter time. [It was for this purpose that John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed) wandered the American frontier planting apple trees.
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Here is a recipe for "Scrumpy", cider powerful enough that you don't need to distill it.
With a 4"x4" post, crush 12-18 pounds of apples (*), and 1/2 pound raisins, in a 5-gallon plastic bucket. Add 1 tsp. 10% K2S2O5 solution OR one Campden tablet. Add 1 tsp DAP. Add 1 Imperial gallon (6/5 US gallon, 4.5 litres) water. Stir well, and test the SG. Add sugar to 1.100. Adjust TA to .7. Prepare a yeast starter from Champagne Yeast, and pitch the yeast immediately. Cover loosely, maintain a 80ºF must temperature, and stir thrice daily. When the SG drops below 1.000, begin sugar feeding (as I described in a recent thread) until the yeast won't take any more. With the right apples you can attain an abv of 18-22%. Keep it on the skins until the cap sinks. Then press, and let it ferment out under airlock. Wait a month after fermentation ends before the first racking. Then rack every 2-3 months until clear. Age for at least a year, preferably two. A second run (almost indistinguishable from the first in flavour) can be done from pressings, but they tend to stick at about 1.005, so don't sugar feed the 2nd run.
(*) use a mixture of apples, with either 10% crab apples, or 30-50% sour grannies.
60 gal. plastic food grade drum or wooden keg. 90 lbs. good pennsylvania wine sap apples, 110 lbs. sugar (cheap kind), 10 lbs. raisens, 13 packs good champagne yeast, H2O to top off drum with proper headspace. Adjust acidity to spec., wait 4 months, rack about
45-47 gallons of the best apple wine ya ever had (14-16%). Never had any luck with the freezing thing, if there's a trick let me know. Froze some of this once & had the same alcohol content after about half frozen & if ya left it too long the whole thing would freeze (5 gal jug).Good luck.
Since distillation of alcohol by any method is highly illegal in most of the world, the following link is provided for academic purposes only:
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(Scroll down to "Freezing")
As pointed out there, if you "accidentally" leave your apple jack outside in the winter, and it "coincidentally" freezes, it may not be illegal. :)
Or to quote a famous politician, "It's only illegal if you get caught".
FWIW, here's a brief discussion on the subject:
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Thanks guys, I've got 5 gal. of last years apple (14%) to play with, I'll see what I can come up with.
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