[cab]

Apples are a great source of pectin. They're full of it, that's why they're firm, and that's why they're added to other jellies and jams to make them set.

Pectin is basically a polysaccharide; a long chain of sugar molecules. You've got (mostly) glactose, galacturonic acid, arabinose and methanol. Pectinase is the enzyme that breaks it down to those constituent components; do that and you turn the apple into a pulp. Pectin is mainly part of the cell wall, you break it down you lose structure and the fruit comes apart. Now there are lots of different sub-enzymes in pectinase. For the life of me I don't know which ones are in the 'pectinol' and 'pectozyme' you can buy, and I should imagine that there are a couple of such enzymes in the mix.

The down side of this in the fermentation of any pectin rich fruit is the liberation of methanol; that happens in all fermentations of all pectin rich fruit, and is the main reason why you shouldn't, under any circumstances, make apple jack! To hell with the legal reasons, think of your own safety; you're likely to blind yourself, if you're lucky enough not to kill yourself!

As an aside, most well characterised yeasts don't break down pectin, you don't get much degradation of the pectin at all. But you can't make the assumption that home brew will be clean enough to kill off everything that can break down pectin; no one produces perfectly clean homebrew. Ever. But at the concentration you produce methanol in ordinary undistilled fermentation, don't worry about it.

In a wine, rather than a cider, the pectinase added to the apple must gets more flavour out; you get a more richly flavoured wine from less fruit (in my opinion), and it also makes the wine clear more rapidly.

[cab]

Apple jack is an illeegal brew

Ask an old timer for details, but it basically relies on the fact that alcohol freezes less readily than water; they used to put a cask of cider on a hilltop (or somewhere else cold), come back later, chip through the ice and pour out the freeze-distilled brew. Traditionally this was done not just to make a brew more potent for drinking (a foolish thing to do with apples, it'll make you blind!), but to make something with a higher alcohol content for better storing; you would dilute it down before drinking.

But as that's illegal, and dangerous, and basically un-necessary, don't do it

[cab]

Ahh, calvados... Great stuff.

The process of making that is far more tightly controlled; because it's classical distillation, they can heat the cider to one temperature to drive off the methanol, and once that's gone (or nearly gone, truth be told) they heat it up again to a higher temperature for the methanol. Basically the same as any distillation process, although I don't know how many times they distill the calvados (cognac is, I believe, twice distilled, as is Scottish whisky, whereas Armegnac (sp?) and Irish are distilled three times, if memory serves; that explains why the latter are generally 'smoother', it's a cleaner process with less side products and exotic alcohols left in).

Don't try this at home. It's highly illegal.

[cab]

Yeah, there will be a trace of methanol there. Don't worry about it though, it will be at a sub-dangerous concentration. Just don't distil it.

Are you stuck with a pectin haze?