The essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things.

-Ernest Renan, “What is a nation”

Can we draw inspiration from this? We are heading to Romania and Hungary, to drink and study ţuică and pálinka, spirits which though different in the eyes of Hungarians and Romanians are all but indistinguishable from the perspective of outsiders and chemists.

This shared love is of course not enough to define  a nation in any geopolitical sense, particularly across languages and borders that remain controversial. These are two very different countries, with very different histories, and the things they have forgotten are correspondingly varied, perhaps even mirror-images of one another.

But we are seeking the borderless nation of brandy-drinkers and brandy-makers, people who do have these spirits in common, and who perhaps have all forgotten a bit of last night, or their own pain, or, for a few hours, the fact that friends and lovers and beautiful moments are all as transient as the perfect shape of a September plum.

University of Leicester Emeritus Professor of Human Geography David Turnock has spent more time than any other English-speaking academic we’ve yet found studying plum brandy in Romania. With Bucharest colleague Nicolae Muica, he’s written extensively about patterns of rural tuica production, and the economic potential of the industry.

That means he comes across good stories, as well as numbers. Like the waste problem. When local distillers dump out the spent mash (and perhaps the unused heads/tails), the residual alcohol doesn’t always disappear without consequence. Animals pick over the trash, for one thing, and Turnock says stories of cows collapsing, or flocks of geese falling asleep for hours in the middle of a village, are common.

Or there’s the town where the dregs were dumped too close to the village water supply, and for a little while the tap water tasted like tuica.

In an interview, Turnock said he was cautious about actually drinking the local product. “You could injure yourself, if it’s really a crude spirit,” he told me. “I’m not sure what the consequences could be to health.”

We’ll have to keep that in mind…

We’re learning to be distillers. And we’re writing about it.

If you’re here reading, it means you probably know us, and have heard us talk more or less endlessly about plum brandy and booze-making across Central Europe. Or you’re interested in distilling and booze-making yourself, in which case, egészségedre!

This blog is designed to chronicle two aspects of this trip. First, we’ll be learning to make the stuff ourselves. This is beginning with a trip to Chicago to study briefly with a craft distiller there (about which more below), but will also involve tasting, some hands-on experimentation, beer- and mash-making, and traveling. We’ll write about much of that here.

However, this will also be a place to begin thinking, researching and writing a book on the Eastern and Central European plum-brandy belt. This is tentatively called “Plum Crazy” (hence the name of the blog), and will chronicle our travels through Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia and Austria drinking with brandy producers and enthusiasts, and trying to get at how this spirit manages to help construct and maintain peoples’ collective and individual identities. (more…)