How many kilos of fruit is required to make a decent amount of brandy ?

[Reiner]

 

   I briefly talked to someone about making plum brandy and the fellow said that even 10 kilos of plums is too little to make a decent batch of plum brandy . Which is why Id like to ask how many kilos of fruit is required to make a relatively decent amount of brandy ( say 10 to 15 liters ) . Im asking for all types of fruit in general by the way , however I realize that different types of fruit may require different amounts , so feel free to correct me . Id also be interested to know if theres an online guide that deals with this topic .

 

 Anyways thanks ahead of time .

[RobertS]

Poking around, I found that juicers have some numbers on yield of juice for lots of different fruit. I would believe that this would give a decent ballpark figure for various fruit wine yields. I plugged your 10 kilos into here and it spat out 995.6 g sugar in 2620.2 mL of water, 38 brix. Assuming no losses or cuts and I didn't make a typo, that would come out to 497.8 mL of 100 proof spirit. After inefficiencies, cuts, and losses, probably closer to 300 mL?

For comparison I looked up wine grapes. Some conversions from here got me to 10 kilos yielding 4626.6 mL of wine. No figure on alcohol content there, I'll assume the average of 13.5 abv. That's about 624.6 mL of 100 proof spirit before inefficiencies and cuts. Obviously my numbers are pretending to be far more precise than they really are, but ~500 vs ~625 shows that the juicers probably have reasonable numbers. Juice needs a lot of fruit, and brandy needs a lot of juice.

FYI: I have yet to make a brandy myself, so these numbers don't have practical experience behind them.

[JustAndy]

A good rule of them is about 25-30 lb of fruit to produce 1 750 ml bottle at 40%. There is a lot of variation to that depending on the sugar level of the fruit, weight of pits/stems/seeds, fermentation and distillation techniques (single pass and discard tails, or double distill with recycled tails), etc. 

To fill a 150 L still with apple, pear, or plum mash takes about 300 lb of fruit.