Jumping the train in Belgrade was an easy decision. A friend who was supposed to meet me there conveniently forgot and had left town; it was midnight and the station was filled with more shadows and lurkers then friendly faces; and I had no dollars, a handful of Turkish lira and some Bulgarian toilet paper, which at the time may have doubled for currency. I was stranded and panicked. So I snuck on the only train still idling in the station, one that was on its way to the Hungarian capital, Budapest.

I made it halfway to the Hungarian border by the good graces of two very young ticket takers who really couldn’t believe that the stowaway trying to sleep on her backpack was both American and Russian-speaking. They quickly forgot about the ticket or my lack of money and we babbled in broken Slavic languages for an hour. Unfortunately their shift was over at the next station, but they made sure to place me in another staff compartment and told me to stay put until Budapest. No one would bother me, they said.

Their replacement had other ideas. An older man, square-shouldered with cheeks covered in stubble, barged into the compartment. Shocked to see someone curled up in his seat, he started to tear in to me in Serbian. What the hell was I doing there? Where was my ticket? I mumbled excuses and pleaded that the previous guards said it was OK, but he either didn’t understand or didn’t really care.

At the next stop a whole circus of gypsies jammed on the train, sending him flying out of the compartment and after the group. I held my ground (it was a very comfortable leather armchair, curiously enough) and tried to sleep. When the ticket taker returned he was less combative. Tipping his cap back he leaned against the compartment wall and started asking me questions in broken Russian.

“Where you from?”

“America.”

“Why no ticket?”

“The Bulgarian border guards took all my money.” (This was true.)

He nodded quietly. My previous confession to the earlier ticket takers elicited the same response. (I believe Bulgaria around this time was run by mafia wrestlers.)

We seemed to come to an understanding. Perhaps he realized that I wasn’t really trying to pull a fast one, but was simply a traveler wronged, one in a long line of poor wanderers taken for a ride by unscrupulous Bulgarian train officials whose practices stained the nobility of ticket takers all over the world. Or perhaps it was just 4 a.m. and he couldn’t be bothered fighting anymore with a feisty vagabond who wouldn’t give up his comfy chair.

The ticket taker flipped the lid of his leather pouch and pulled out a small, plastic Coke bottle filled with a clear liquid. Unscrewing the lid, he paused, took a swig then said seriously:

“The Hungarians will liquidate you.”

I swallowed what saliva I had left in my dry mouth. Liquidate?

He handed me the bottle. Being naïve, I thought it was water. I took a healthy gulp, swallowed and almost threw up on the spot. (I hadn’t had a meal in about a day.) I stumbled out of the compartment and just made it to the toilet before I retched up every bit that was left in my stomach. I splashed some water on my face, rinsed my mouth out and took a deep breath. I tried to play it cool when I returned to the compartment, but the ticket taker didn’t seem to notice. He held out the bottle for me again, this time with a bit of a smile: he had pulled off half the bottle in my short absence.

I sipped again. The liquid stung my raw throat but going down was warming rather than fiery, and for the first time that day (that felt like a week) I felt the knots in my neck and back relax. As I tried to give him the bottle back, he waved his hand, and with an odd sort of benediction, encouraged me to take another sip.

“Three times. Father, son and ghost.”

Plenty of people have found Jesus at the bottom of a whiskey bottle. I didn’t expect to come across the pope of plum brandy at 4 a.m. on a train creeping toward the Serbian-Hungarian border. After my third sip (considerably more generous than the second), I closed my eyes and fell asleep. When I opened them, the ticket taker was gone, the sun had risen, and I was on my way to Budapest.

Grigo’s family friend Valerica, who serves as a guide at the museum, is the daughter of a family described by Grigo’s father as the “Johnny Walkers of Transylvania” — orchard-owners, who at one point made a prodigious amount of spirits. She does not drink herself, but as we stopped by the museum for directions to another village distiller’s home, she saw how pale Grigo had become, and told him that if he was sick, the best thing he could do for himself was to take a medicinal dose of plum brandy.

I am on my way to do this now.

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.

We’ve spent the past few weeks scouring the Web and our ever-growing stacks of history and culture books to assemble what we feel (hope?) will be the best cross-section of palinka culture in Hungary — from producers to retailers to lovers to bloggers to, well, whomever wants to sit down and yap with us for a bit over a glass or two.  In a language we can understand, hopefully.  Mi nem beszélnek magyarul.

Here’s the map so far.  We’re especially excited about visiting Agardi, which makes some of the finest palinka we’ve tasted; there’s a curious palinka museum to the east of Budapest attached to a brewery that might prove interesting; and the list of palinka “knights” (complete with Middle Age-inspired outfits and pastoral gatherings and castles) surprisingly seems to grow.

View Plum Crazy: Hungary 2010 in a larger map

Our timing is good, too; one of the recently elected government’s campaign promises was to lift the ban on home distilling.  This promise made it into Fidesz’ economic plan, but there’s plenty of turmoil and controversy (and the legislative influence of the EU).  Yet it remains to be seen whether bread and circuses (or palinka and ethnic baiting) will keep Hungarians distracted from other, more pressing, issues.  There will be no shortage of things to talk about while at the bar…

We first tasted their products a few years ago on a trip to Budapest, late on a lazy summer café evening, at a waitress’ recommendation. A plum and a honey-based brandy, both outstanding. We brought home a bottle of the plum, long since gone, but a generous friend has now procured a new bottle of the Barrique Plum for us.

Our thoughts: On first pour, and early sip, there is a strong hint of green herb, like a wet, crushed mint or catnip. This loosens over a few minutes into a blend of well-defined ripe plum and the toasted caramel of the barrel. Though the two flavors are distinct, we noted a strong spicy character closest to cloves, as well as a pleasant sweetness that reminded me of the Smarties candies of my childhood. Very pleasant, very smooth, although I found the barrel flavor a bit overpowering. I’d love to taste the same batch or blend without nearly so much wood.

Unfortunately, the company has stopped putting the original producer or producers’ name on the bottle (our first bottle listed the original distiller, and Rézangyal as the bottler.) As a geek, I’d love to know these things. But even with the slight over-wooded flavor, this bottle – like everything I’ve tasted with this label – comes highly recommended.

If anybody knows of producers we’ve missed, let us know.

View Palinka Distilleries in a larger map

You see this retained in language, in the expression: Pálinkás jó reggelt!, which translates variously as “A pálinka good morning,” or “Good morning with pálinka!”

Naturally, there are explanations for this early, to American palates nearly inconceivable practice. Balázs quotes a handful of folk sayings:

In the morning, wine sleeps and shouldn’t be woken, so pálinka must be drunk.

or alternately:

Before wine, pálinka, then a bit of sausage, just so the coffee won’t hurt later.

A confession: When visiting a friend for a Transylvanian wedding, we were on hand for the arrival of a close Hungarian friend of the groom and groom’s brother. Maybe 10 in the morning. We gathered underneath the shade of the walnut tree to welcome him, and the bottle of brandy came out, glasses were filled, and the friend’s arrival was toasted. We smiled, and I surreptitiously poured the spirits into the grass.

But I was young. Today I would have wished them a Pálinkás jó reggelt! and let the wine sleep in a little longer.

“Propose requesting American Protectorate of Hungary and if possible declare Hungary a State of the American Union stop.”

Kun’s reply, two days later, in French: “Nous avons reçu votre dépêche,” which Magris translates as a laconic “Communication noted.”

The socialist Kun was never likely to take his aristocratic negotiator’s advice. He was rather desperate for support from Lenin’s Russia, which was itself bogged down in civil war. To win public support for his then two-month-old government, Kun turned instead to winning back lost territory.

A key focus was Transylvania, previously a province of Hungary, but which held a Romanian ethnic majority. The Romanian army had already occupied much of the territory, leading in part to the resignation of Hungary’s government and Kun’s rise to power. On June 28, a few days after Baron Szilassy pleaded with Kun to cast his lot with the Americans, the Western powers officially awarded Transylvania to Romania as a part of the Treaty of Versailles.

Romanian troops enter Budapest

In reality, the treaty was premature. Hungarian and Romanian forces were still at war. But not for long – Kun’s military collapsed after only few months, and by early August, Romanian forces had occupied Budapest, and Kun himself had fled to the young Soviet Union (where he would ultimately be killed in a Stalinist purge).

Better to have sought American statehood? In a region where political certainties were collapsing along with an empire rooted far deeper in history than were America’s own 150 years of statehood, crazier ideas were being floated.

A vocal segment of today’s right-wing revival in Hungary wants Transylvania and the rest of the former “Greater Hungary” back. It isn’t likely to happen, but it will make relations with Romania and Slovakia tense as long as the right wing is in power.

It’s worth noting that common ground does exist, however. A scholar of pálinka in Hungary, Géza Balázs, notes that the word for the country’s national liquor actually comes from the Slovakian language. And in Romania too, or at least Transylvania, plum spirits are sometimes called pălincă as well as tuica.

Koval's Kothe-designed still

Chicago’s Koval Distillery is tucked into a warehouse space next to a microbrewery, one of those happy accidents of location that makes both businesses’ lives easier, and seems to be a fairly common story among craft distillers. Robert and Sonat Birnecker started the business just a few years ago, the second craft distiller in the state (after the excellent North Shore Distillery), and are building it into something unique even among the idiosyncratic world of craft distilling.

Their products, for a start, are strikingly unique. They lead with a range of 100% single-grain white whiskeys – Rye, Wheat, Oat, Spelt and Millet – most of which are all but unknown in the States as grist for distillation. They make a pear brandy similar to an Austrian classic, a rye-based vodka, a bierbrand, and a range of liquors infused with flavors like fresh ginger, rose hips, coffee and jasmine. Everything is rigorously organic, down to the processing of the staves in the custom-made barrels they’re using to age their whiskey.

They’re also the U.S. representatives of Kothe Distillationstechnik, one of the most prominent still-makers in Germany, and twice a year or more Robert and Sonat offer classes aimed at helping people start and run a craft distillery.

We’re now a few weeks back from their spring session, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. We had chosen this class because of its focus on business and legal aspects, in addition to simple hands-on distilling time. And they delivered, with guest speaker on insurance, trademark law, federal licensing (you’re going to screw it up, but don’t worry — just don’t try to cheat), distribution, and even barrel-making.

Robert and Sonat talked about their own choices: locating the business in Chicago, selecting raw ingredients and developing products, choosing a distributor rather than self-distributing, how to make sure your neighbors don’t make the business impossible to run. The insanely knowledgeable Klaus Hagmann of Kothe led the class through the chemistry of fermentation and the physical aspects of still design and operation.

Feeding flour into the mash tank

All this was in addition to the making of a wheat-whiskey mash, and the distillation of another run of the wheat whiskey.

A big reality-check, in short. This is a difficult business. And a snowballing one—around the country, dozens or maybe scores of new craft distilleries are being born. It’s not clear that there is room for them al in the market, but I think this is a matter of time. The demand is not yet there, because people don’t know of their existence. We did a small sample of cocktail- and liquor-friendly bars while travelling, and found craft distillery products in only a few. That will grow, as microbrewing did; give it five years, and people will know to ask for Koval’s Chicago Rye or House Spirits’ Aviation Gin by name.

It will be a while before we get to the point of actually setting up a commercial operation. The book comes first, as part of our campaign to make fruit brandies A Thing in America. But until then, a big thanks to Robert and Sonat and Klaus for helping us and dozens of other get started in an inspiring way.