EVERYTHING you ever wanted to know about STAUFFENBERG GIN but were afraid to ask

The Story

super short: A Berlin artist turns the family hobby into a small family business.

2009: Franz von Stauffenberg is an artist. He is living in Berlin, exhibiting in museums in Germany and Switzerland, showing with Galerie Esther Schipper. He visits his mother down south regularly, and starts playing around with fire, and by that I mean the small copper oven, from which about 40 bottles of plum schnaps dribbled out per year. Franz brings a few bottles back for friends in the middle of the Finance Crisis. They love it.  Yasmine Gauster and Alexander Schroeder (of Galerie Neu) love it so much they offer to launch it at their pop-up store in Charlottenburg. Voila. An edelbrand one-man business is born.

2013: Franz begins working on a recipe for a spirit even more friends might enjoy. Like a mad scientist in his lab, he comes up with a complicated and wonderful concoction of some 17 botanicals and gin’s signature juniper berry. We serve it straight. We serve it up as shots, warm. No ice, no mixers. We offer it to women at the ABC art fair in Berlin even when they give us a hands-up rejection: “I DON’T DRINK GIN. Please, no. It’s 3pm in the afternoon.” But when these same chaste ladies taste it, after April (the mistress of the master distiller) has basically forced a shot down them, pleading please, their eyes light up. “What is this? I don’t like gin and I love this gin!” The mad thing is about it is that it is completely hangover-free. How’d Franz do it?

More (diary style)

The longer story: it’s Election Night, 2008. My wife and I are spending the night in Carsten Höller’s Revolving Hotel Room in the Guggenheim Museum. (She had been commissioned by the German Vanity Fair to write up a story about the experience.) It was the night Obama got elected, so we didn’t spend much time in that bed. Before we knew it, security guards were delivering us fresh squeezed OJ and told we had to get dressed and get out before the first museum visitors arrived. It was also a little more than a month after Lehman had collapsed. A show of mine was about to open in New York in the next days – the world looked a lot different all of a sudden. The euphoria of Obama but also the “conceptual” strategies of “financialization” had almost brought down the economy. And here I was in a rotating bed on a platform at the top of Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral architecture. It felt like all the signs were there. I felt that a double-take was needed now. I needed to operate in a world parallel to the ethereal economy of the artworld – in the real economy. 

My family has been distilling spirits for their own pleasure for centuries. Somewhere, the craft of distilling is deep in my bones. Turning the same attention that I gave to art making into hand-crafting a real product that would knock not only my own socks off but also those of my wife. Slowly, I learned how to make a high-end plum brandy out of the best plums I could find locally and from the trees in my mother’s back yard.

In September 2009, we launched the schnaps to a small circle of friends in Berlin, and word spread fast. Soon thereafter restaurants in Berlin such as Grill Royal and Paulys Saal caught hold of the fever and wanted a few bottles of their own hangover-free Stauffenberg. —Franz

The distillery ……

super short: on the groundfloor of his mother’s house, a small copper oven

Given the professional look of the bottle, you’d think we have a large distillery with lots of workers in crisp white coats and gloves. Nope. The “distillery” is even a fancy name for it. It’s more like just an 80-year-old oven, a copper one. It is on the ground floor of my mother-in-law’s house, who used to live in the castle nearby. And yes, to answer your question: that castle is the very same one in which the famous Claus von Stauffenberg was born (You know? You don’t? He’s one of the men who tried to kill Hitler. We don’t like to hark on this issue, but everyone is always curious. Sure it’d be a great ad campaign, but we don’t like to make light of it!). —April

The Still

It’s copper. That’s what all good gins are made in. Ours is old, from 1937, making her 81 years old. Maybe her experience adds to the flavor? We wouldn’t know as we’ve never tried distilling anywhere else! —April

The Making

This is all a big secret my husband likes to keep. Please don’t try to bribe me for his recipe. He won’t tell me because he knows I have a really big mouth. —April

The Micro Mini Batch

supershort: 180 handcrafted bottles

What does (incredibly) small batch mean?

Unbelievable indeed: you look at the perfect bottle and it’s hard to imagine that it’s all made by the hands of my husband: from chopping the wood for the oven to the handwork of distilling (without the aid of any thermometers or computers!) and the master distiller’s secret recipe to the hand-numbered labels and rolling each bottle into silk paper! Each batch is around 180 bottles. That’s really really small! —April

Botanicals

supershort: 17 botanicals, the best we can find

I chose the botanicals from various sources – only the very best. From that, I crafted a recipe. Only the amount needed is prepared and added each time a new batch is fired up. First the demand, then the supply. No surplus, no excess: I only make as much as we are asked for! In that sense, I am a part of the old economy. No marketing, no hype, no pressure to repay a bank for loans made on risky business. —Franz

Alcohol 

supershort: organic wheat, sourced from Mecklenburg

The organic wheat I selected is grown and harvested in Mecklenburg Germany, and distilled into an all-organic 100% spirit. Its superb quality was what made me decide to use it as a base for the gins: dry, aged, and now our sloe gin, my wife’s new favorite. As she likes to joke, “KEEP THAT BOTTLE AWAY FROM ME!” I must have done something right. —Franz

Maceration

The all-organic botanicals are lazy, luxury loving types, taking a hot overnight bath of at least 12 hours! In the morning, they get an energetic topper-offer, fresh citrus peels. —April

Distillation

The still is fired up with chopped wood from regional beech trees. An hour later the temperature is high enough to turn the alcohol into vapor separating the ethanol from water. The vapors take a nice journey over the copper surfaces and make a passage through the small condenser and that turns them back into liquid again. Heads and tails are carefully distinguished and separated. Only the heart is married with water from an alpine source to become the unique Stauffenberg Dry Gin.  

The Finishing

supershort: all local —the labels, the boxes, the silk paper??

The packaging is printed, produced and shipped by locals in an environmentally friendly form. It’s costly, but beautiful. Each bottle is polished (removing my fingerprints) and wrapped in silk paper by my own hand before it is sent off in the post.

The Team

Master distiller and artist Franz von Stauffenberg is well-versed in the language of schnaps and brandies. He grew up with them, so to speak, from childhood on in the village of Jettingen where the family distilled regular batches of plum schnaps (in the same castle, yes, the very same one in which the well-known member of the German Resistance was born). The copper still is 81 years old and still running strong, giving the schnaps its distinctive characteristics. Using only well-selected, all-organic ingredients to make an incredibly high-caliber gin, it’s probably the simplicity of it all which makes it all the more worthwhile to distill in small handmade batches — from one-man’s-hands alone! 

Since 2013, he threw what he learned about brandies into crafting a special blend of some 17 organic botanicals to make an explosive gin like none other. The traditional copper pot still is without a doubt the invisible hand in creating the more elegant notes of this (incredibly) small-batch gin, distilled still today from the hands of one man alone.

April von Stauffenberg is a writer and the mouthpiece behind it all, endlessly promoting and acquiring new clients. (She’s American, so her German is on the colorful side, beware.) She’s in Berlin holding down the fort while Franz is mostly in Jettingen, behind the oven. She’s strictly against all unnecessary packaging and keeps her husband ecologically-minded. She is in the distillery down south every summer, washing the fruits and removing seeds from the ton of apples, pears, apricots and plums (it’s a love-of-labor, our organic schnaps) while her husband is up the ladder shaking the trees. Their daughter Wilhelmine, age 6, is also proving a great help making boxes and sticking labels on the mini-bottles.

++++++++++++++Awards

Cocktail Spirits Paris 2017

Spirits Innovation Award Best Gin

San Francisco WorldSpirits 2017    

Silver  

DestilleBerlin 2013

Silver Best Gin (blind-taste jury selection)

Gold Best Gin (selected by consumers at the fair)

London Graft Distilling Expo 2014 

Best Contemporary European

World Gin awards London 2016

Best German