Apple Cordial/Apple Brandy Wine - What NOW?

It's been four months and we want to update you on how the Apple Brandy or Apple Cordial is coming along. So let's get started. Hey everyone, welcome back to Heart Way Farms. Today is another update video and it's kind of fun to get this stuff checked off the list and get it off of my freezer because that's where it's been sitting for four months. So this is our update video on the Apple Brandy wine or Apple Cordial. People call it different things. You've seen different videos and we wanted to try it and give our update on it. So that's what today is. And this is interesting because I was just looking at some posts about this exact thing in a different group and people were like, wow, I didn't realize how much would evaporate from it. And I'm kind of on that same team. We had a lot evaporate out of our apples and our raisins. So let's backtrack. When this started several months ago, Julianne and I chopped up, we were gifted some apples. I call them deer apples. They're a bunch of just like good cider apples. They call them apple seconds, you know, that people don't necessarily want to eat fresh. They might have imperfections or worm holes or whatever. And people drop them off here, which is a huge blessing because we give them to the animals. But honestly, some of them are amazing. So we turn them into all sorts of things, which is what kind of inspired this whole It's almost like I have ways to teach you how to use different apples. So we did. We did exactly that. Someone dropped off a bunch of apples and they were beautiful and delicious and amazing. So we're like, let's make all the things we made, you know, pie. We made Julianne's favorite thing to make is apple butter. And it is so good. If you have not checked out Julianne's apple butter recipe, it is the best one. And I'm not just saying that because I'm her mom. I have gotten so many comments, so much feedback from all of you who have tried her recipe and it's your favorite and it is our favorite. So make sure you check that out. We'll link that around here somewhere. So this can be used for the cordial, which is the drinking portion of it. But then all of the scraps, you can use them in like muffins and stuff like that, too. You can use them for baking purposes. Sure. That's what the experts say. That is what the experts say. If you want some boozy muffins, this is what you should use. Is that where you're going to come up with a recipe? I don't know. Apparently I should. So we tried two different alcoholic beverages making them. We love kombucha. And for years, Josh made it before we ever moved onto this farm property. And it was kind of funny because that's a question we get all the time is why don't you guys make kombucha? Some things just have to fall by the wayside. You can't do everything. We don't believe in doing everything because you'll never have any moments to yourself in life. But one thing that has fallen by the wayside is making kombucha. And I would love to get back to that because it's one of our favorite beverages for almost all of us. I think seven out of eight of us enjoy kombucha. Yeah, we did the constant brew. So we had the container where you just took it off the bottom and it just kept it brewing. So that was kind of nice too. So we've made kombucha before. Love it. Totally support it. Want to get back into it. But this year we tried our hand at some peach wine because we had been given tons of peaches from our friend. And we were running out of things to make with them. So we tried it and actually that has turned out really nice. It took forever. But it's really good now. It took a long time. Yes. We're not even going to do an update video on it because it took so long. And I know this video has gone off the deep end. But we started making this peach wine. And the goal was we were like, hey, let's see. Because we're not winemakers at all. I kind of wanted a kombucha, like a peach kombucha. Yeah, let's try to stop the process when it starts getting kind of bubbly and fermenty and yeasty and have some carbonation to it. That never happened. We tried it through the whole process. And if you make wine, you know about it. You probably understand why that didn't happen. But on the timeline when the wine should have been done, it was more like peach moonshine. Yes. Like that's how strong it was. Peach hooch. Strong it was. It was fine. But it was like this is not what we tried to do. So we put it – that was before we went into the second ferment. And now it's been bottled and down fermenting in the root cellar. And now it actually tastes like peach wine. Maybe we'll have to do an update video on that. I just did. I just gave an update video. Anyway, now it's really good. And you could absolutely cook with it. We've talked about making different tinctures and different things with it. And even adding it into a kombucha down the road here so that it's diluted down. Because historically speaking, we don't keep alcohol in the house. We don't drink. But we wanted to try some of these fermented products because they are really good for you. They have good gut health. And we love kombucha. And it's not like we're anti those things. I would much rather, and someone's going to get mad at me, but I would much rather if someone has a cough or a cold, give them a little swig of those alcoholic beverages over store-bought nasty cough medicine. So I have no issue keeping those things in the house. We're bartering with those or cooking with those. Some of my favorite recipes have white wine or red wine in them. So those are some of the staples that we keep in the pantry and keep in the house. And once again, it's another skill set. If you learn how to use basic ingredients, basic things, or have basic things in the house, you can have that fruit that's gifted to you and turn it into something usable, even if it's in a condition that you wouldn't normally cook with. Hey, friends. Do you hate meal planning as much as I used to? Well, I don't anymore because I have created free resources just for you so that you can put together a meal plan for an entire year. Did I say free? Check it out. So that's what we did for this apple brandy wine. I've seen these recipes all over other people's channels. And these have been going on for centuries. They've been making these for a long time. So some things that surprised me, some things that we did. Let's start with that. These are the same crocks. If you've seen any of my—it smells really good. So I will say we've tasted a little bit of this. And this, as opposed to the peach wine, is delicious, I'm just going to say. But we're going to get to that in a minute. But if you've seen my other preservation videos where we're lining eggs, water glassing eggs, I love these crocks. These are from Walmart, and they are 3-gallon crocks, and they have lids that have no gasket or anything. They're just glass on glass, which is why we went ahead and did the plastic wrap. Now, if you were following this recipe to do your apple cordial or your apple brandy wine, I've heard it called both. I believe it is recommended to do an airtight situation, which surprises me with a ferment. So I need to do a little bit more— It's airtight, but it has the ability to release out. So it's something that you would put— So that's what I did. Yes, we tried to do that. So I put on plastic wrap, and some people said put rubber bands. Some people said use airtight. We did a heavy layer of plastic wrap and then pushed this down to create— there is a little lip here, it's probably hard to tell— to kind of create that seal, which is what we did. And we left it for months. Yes, it's going on five months. Four or five months, something like that. Kind of set it and forget it, leave it alone. You're supposed to put it in a warm spot so it ferments, but we had no issues. I saw bubbles in these almost immediately, and we did go back after a few days into it, press it back down, and add more apples. We did a whole other layer of apples with raisins and a sprinkle of sugar. Those are the only ingredients. Apples, some organic cane sugar, and some of our organic raisins. So we did go back and do that, but then we just let it go because I didn't want to keep doing that or mess up the ferment. Are they dry? No, it still has moisture to it. I was looking at the—they've got like a— People said it would mold. There's no mold on this at all. That's kind of normal, supposedly. I think it's because they truly fermented it in that time, too, which helps. I mean, I guess you could have removed the liquid when it was still up to like here, but maybe it wouldn't have been as strong. I'm not sure. So anyway, here we are. It smells amazing. Yeah, I can start pouring. It smells so good. I don't expect there to be—let me get you a spoon or something to get it out. These look—actually, these look like they would be really good to cook with. Look at them. I guess you don't need a spoon. So I'm assuming we're going to have to press these down. Well, that's why I was going to put them in a bag. Okay. So that we can really squeeze them because, yeah, there's barely anything. I think we need to compress this in a bag. All right. Off camera, we tried a couple things because we did the initial strain, and this is the only—this is all of the liquid that was in the bottom. Actually, there was even a little bit less than that. These are holding a ton of liquid, though. The fruit is holding so much. So we tried a couple different things to figure out what solution would be the best way to get the most liquid out of all of these delicious apples because it really smells and tastes pretty good. So I'm excited about that, and I don't really want to just feed this to the chickens. So we tried the tomato mill, the one that just goes around. We tried the crank one, and those were just kind of shooting stuff all over. So I honestly—I just took one of our little—it's like an almond milk bag or what we use for elderberry bag to strain that out. And what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take—and this is going to take a little bit of time, but I don't mind doing it because I want to preserve this liquid. So I'm going to fill this up, and maybe we can even take turns. We'll see. And then I'm just going to—down here, because it does shoot, there's so much liquid you're going to see. See how much liquid is coming out of this, Marie? Like, I don't want to waste all that by tossing that. So I'm going to try to just squeeze out each batch of apples. We do have a juicer, but I think these are way too soft that they're just going to turn to mush in the juicer. That's the only reason I don't think that's going to work. So this is worth the time and the effort, and I'm going to see how much apple brandy wine or apple cordial we can get out of these before we put it away into storage. I'm sure we could do it a little bit more passive as far as just mushing it all up and then letting it hang, and it would kind of gravity come out. I don't know, man. Like, these feel dry. Like, I think if you just do this, nothing's coming. No, no, I'm saying if we broke it down in the bag and kind of let it go, yeah. So anyway, I'm going to work through these apples, and I'll let you know how much we end up with. Okay, we are getting closer to being done with this process. Okay, in other videos that I have seen on this, I'll be honest, I haven't seen quite how to extract the liquid other than putting all of the fruit in a bag and hanging it and letting it drip. That is not the experience that we had, and so we're going to share that with all of you. So what we decided to do, as you saw already, is we put the fruit in a straining bag and squeezed out. I got a lot of liquid out just doing that, but of course, Mr. Muscle's here. He could get a lot more out of it, and Josh is like, once you're done squeezing out the liquid, I'm going to go ahead and puree that and squeeze it again and see if I can get even more out. And it is working, so this is taking more time, but I feel like it's making it worth the effort to actually get a good amount of juice out of it. Had we just strained it and let it hang, I don't even know that we would have had even 16 ounces at all. It was very little, very small amount of liquid. So this way, we are getting as much as possible out of the fruit, blending the apples, so I squeezed them, then Josh blended them, squeezed them again, and here we are. And we still have this whole bowl to strain out. So after one time of blending it, we've got this blended puree that we've now... You blended and squeezed it, and now this is the pulp. It's definitely pulp. Chicken food. Sure. But we're not going to cook with it. I know other people talk about making things with the apple scraps. We don't need to. But we're just going to end up giving this probably back to the chickens now. So anyway, a little bit of labor of love, but I'm excited because this looks way more worth the effort than what it did look like. Yeah, like all that moisture, like I thought a lot of it evaporated off. It smells so good. It did, but I think a lot of it absorbed, and we're unlocking it from that fruit. Okay, and I'm sorry. Yes, just for the sake of the video, and because it's going to take Josh a while to do this. Yes. I'm going to let him do that, but... That is really delicious and warming. You could totally... That's really good. It's really smooth, actually. It's not like bitter alcohol. That's really yummy. You can try that. So this is worth the effort to get... It still has a fermented smell to it. It's really nice, though. Yeah, it's nice. But it tastes good just as it is, but you could do lots of different things with this. We'll give it a little... It looks like a cider, but it's like a... I don't know. It's like a hard cider. Okay, all right. So Josh is going to go through the rest of the process and see how much liquid we end up with in the end. Okay. Okay, that was quite a process, but I wouldn't say it wasn't worth it. I mean, I would say that it was worth it. We more than doubled the amount of fluid up there. Because the process of putting the apples in with the raisins and the sugar and then covering it, that was completely hands-off for all of those months. And then today, I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know if we were just going to be able to strain it and it would be easy, but it was worth the extra process. Had we not, we would have barely had any liquid at all. So this is a lot of... Almost three gallons. Of apple cordial, yes. Or apple brandy wine. So I'm really excited and thankful that Josh came up with the idea to try to puree it and go through the process. If you decide to go through this process, don't get discouraged if there's not a lot of liquid. All that liquid is hiding inside of the apples. You just have to go through the process of getting it out of there. So I did not expect to have this much. So now we're going to hunt down some bottles. I have some old, beautiful syrup bottles from my dad. He processes out his own syrup. So we're going to bottle this up and put it away. And make more messes, because that's what Josh does. That's where Julianne gets it from. But it's got a beautiful flavor. Really happy with that. So we're going to get this bottled up, put down in the root cellar, and use it for all sorts of things. Over the next year. So if you want to learn more on how to use your apples, check out this video right here.