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…

When fermenting and distilling fruits, it’s important to work as far as humanly possible only with the flesh itself. Particularly when dealing with apples, plums, cherries and pears, you want to de-seed, de-pit and de-stem. Partly because seeds and pits hold a bitter tannic flavor that is carried over into the final distillate, and masks pure fruit aromas. But also because there’s poison in there.

Plum pits (and other fruit seeds) contain a compound called hydrocyanic acid (HCN), also known as hydrogen cyanide or prussic acid. It’s nasty stuff, with a slight almond scent, and is deeply poisonous in the right quantities. A version of it was produced as Zyklon B and used in the gas chambers by the Nazis during WWII, and is today the compound that some U.S. states use in their execution gas chambers.

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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. Read the rest of this entry »