You say Plum and I say Prune, either way it burns going down when you drink the schnapps…

I delivered the must(fermenting fruit that is turning into wine) from our prunes today to the Bauernhof Brennerai Lüthy near Aargau, Switzerland. As is often the case in Switzerland, you drive down a tiny road that is officially an agricultural road only to get to a farm yard.  In this case, they also have barrels of fermenting stone fruit and apples in the front.  Each one coming from the tree or trees from people all over Switzerland.  Lüthy specializes in small batch production.

Prunes are a type of plum most often used for dried fruit in the United States and Europe.  They are also used for making prune brandy, slivovitz, vielle prune or zwetschgen schnapps.  All that is needed is a clean container, clean ripe prunes, and time.  This must is two months old and continues to ferment.  The distillery will wait until the alcohol content gets up to 12 to 14 percent and they add it into their stills.

 

 

The stills are works of art.  Copper and stainless steel, they are constantly bubbling and hissing as the must is heated and the alcohol is evaporated up into the still where the vapor is cooled and collected into another pot.

 

 

 

Our meager barrel joined many others with apricots, prunes, damascene plums, apples and some late season cherries.  Although there are different fruit, the basic process is the same.

So now they will check the alcohol levels over the next few months and when they get high enough they will distill our prune mash into a pure alcohol.  To make it less of the fire water that most people think of as schnapps they will add water to it so that it is a bit smoother as it goes down.  In the end, they expect between 3 and 5 liters of schnapps for us to age and enjoy in a couple of years.