Apple, pear, and grape brandy, keep skin during fermentation and distilling?

[Geoman]

Howdi,

On commercial scale, what are the pros and cons of keeping skin in fruit brandies, particularly apple brandy?  Why spend money to buy fruit press/ filter?

Thanks in advance

[kkbodine]

I actually got so tired of endless pressing at one distillery that I did exactly this. We stopped pressing apple mash and just fermented as is. As fermentation ended, we drained as much liquid as possible to be distilled and composted the remains. Apples at the time were about $0.05 per pound. We saved 100's of man hours and quality was at least as good a when we pressed.