For a while I have been looking for watermelon recipes and instead generally found stigma that fermenting and distilling watermelon was not worth the time.
I figured the water content of the fruit plus any fermentable sugars it would have to pass some reasonable flavour into the wash and carry over in the distillate in a 4” 4 plate bubbler. What I made I split 50% / 50% white and 5g/L French Oak as a brandy. Both have turned out very palatable as a smooth subtle white spirit and a sweet smelling dry lightly oaked brandy.
Since I didn’t manage to find much in the way of recipes I thought I would post what I did.
For a 30L Wash:
~4-6 kg watermelon (seedless are easier if you can get them cheaply)
6 kg whit sugar
1 teaspoon epsom salts
1 vitamin B tablet
½ teaspoon DAP
½ teaspoon citric acid
1 x 5g sashay EC-1118
Deseeded and roughly chopped melon into clean bucket, added 2 L water and pureed with stick blended. Sugar, citric acid and Epsom salts dissolved in ~5 L boiling water. Contents of both buckets added fermenter with ~6 L cold water and let rest for ~20min before filling to 30L and mixing in DAP and Vitamin B tablet. Yeast was rehydrated for app 30 min in ~100 mL ~27°C water then pitched at ~28°C.
Was slow on the kick off and formed a notable cap which I stirred back in once a day for the first three days after which it took off.
I ran it on four plates, slow for the fore’s and early heads then cranking up through the hearts and into the tails. Found the tails to carry a bit of flavour and aroma so did a bit of blending on the portion that oaked. Ended up with 400 mL fores, ~2.6 L of keeps at 95% ABV and roughly 1.2 L feits stripped down to 30% ABV.
Overall think the info I found sold watermelon short as I found the brandy incredibly flavoursome that carried an array of tastes. I aged for 10 months on 5 g/L French oak dominos and will be doing so again (hopefully for longer) once melons are a bit cheaper mid-season.