Crystal Clear: A Guide to Real Schnaps
Austrian schnaps is the essence of peak-of-season-fruit
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Credit: Michael Kraus
I've heard many variations on this story: schnapps (often peach but sometimes peppermint) consumed in odd places (basement rec rooms, booze cruises) and by odd methods (a water gun?) by people more concerned with inebriation than with taste. Somehow, though, I never drank it myself. Maybe there was always enough beer around, or perhaps, once Id acquired a mildly discriminating palate, the drink's debased reputation scared me off. When it came to schnapps, I thought, Why bother?
But that was before I learned about the good stuff. On a trip to Vienna last summer, I met Peter Hämmerle, the spirits critic for Falstaff, the country's top food magazine. A trim 53-year-old with a neat goatee, steely short hair, and rimless eyeglasses, Hämmerle grew up in Vorarlberg, the mountainous Alpine state where the making of schnaps is a local art. In his apartment I found myself surrounded by hundreds of bottles of the best schnaps in Austria—the country that produces more of this type of fruit brandy than anywhere else.
"I was born in a region where lots of fruits grow, and it's quite normal that everybody has trees behind their house," he told me. Once a year, a communal mobile still would circulate among the households, and the families would follow a process (as they still do today) that's little changed since distillation technology became widespread in Austria in the 18th century. At each home, someone would mash fruits—usually apples, pears, plums, and cherries—and let them ferment for several days, then distill them into a strong, clear liquor of around 65 percent alcohol. Water would then be added to make the drink palatable, bringing the alcohol content down to around 40 or 50 percent. This was real schnaps (as compared with schnapps, the sugar-sweetened, cordial-like American version I remember from my youth). Schnaps, which Hämmerle explained is simply the term for fruit brandy in Austria, is also known as edelbrande or eau-de-vie; other regional brandies, like France's calvados (made with apples) and eastern Europe's slivovitz (made with plums), fall in the category that Austrians would call schnaps. The drink was bottled immediately, and families kept bottles on hand to serve when guests stopped by, or at the end of a meal.
As common as schnaps was, it was rarely very good. "The pears and apples you couldn't sell, you used them for schnaps," Hämmerle said. Nowadays, he added, producers realize that you cannot make fine schnaps from subpar fruit. As an example, he poured a schnaps made from Williams pears (the same variety as Bartlett) from Stockvogler's, a distillery one hour south of Vienna, into a traditional long-stemmed, V-shaped glass. The nose was incredible, a burst of sharp pear skin, and when I sipped it, the potent elixir spread ripe fruit and warm alcohol through every part of my mouth. It was, at first taste, the best pear I'd ever eaten—and yet it was like no pear I'd ever eaten. Abstracted from the action of biting and chewing, the schnaps was the Platonic ideal of the Williams pear.
That impression got complicated as we tasted different scnaps and I encountered less–familiar fruits. I recognized the floral, citrusy quince, but the powerful almond flavor of rowanberries was altogether new to me, as was the mysterious mispel, with its vegetal, almost pickled–artichoke taste. (I later learned mispel is Japanese loquat. That hardly helped.) How could I make sense of these drinks? It was like reading Joyce's Ulysses without ever having heard of the Odyssey.
See 14 schnaps to try now »
Many years ago, a liquer called Kirsch (cherry flavored) became popular among some young people I knew at the time. I wanted Lynne to ask you if Kirsch is also a type of schnapps.