In trendy bars there is hardly any demand for Swiss brandy: please have a gin – no one will reach for the Obstler

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As a digestif after a lavish dinner or as an eponymous ingredient in the famous Zug cherry cake – Swiss fruit brandies can do something. But demand for domestic spirits has been falling for some time.

Christine Badertscher (41), National Councilor of the Greens, wants to change that. In an initiative she pleads for more support for local drink producers. But why is the popularity of local fires decreasing?

Liberalization and lack of support

Since the spirits law was liberalized in the late 1990s, foreign spirits such as whisky, gin and vodka have become massively cheaper. Swiss producers can hardly keep up in terms of price.

Lorenz Humbel (58), owner and director of the distillery of the same name in Stetten AG, says: “With the closure of the Federal Alcohol Administration in 2015, a lot of know-how was lost. There is no official coordination and point of contact for us producers. »

Humbel welcomes Badertscher’s advance. He hopes for more help from the federal government. “Because unlike, for example, Swiss wine producers or European schnapps distilleries, the Swiss producers of spirits do not receive any support for sales promotion.”

“Not at home in bars”

Humbel sees another reason for the sharp decline in the consumption of local schnapps in culture change. «In the past, after eating in a restaurant, you drank a digestif or a kafi schnapps and you sat down for a while. Nowadays that often shifts to a pub.”

Now you might think it doesn’t matter where you have your nightcap – but that’s not true. Humbel: «Bars and pubs come from Anglo-Saxon countries. That’s why there’s whiskey and gin – the fruit brandy was never really represented there.

Cocktails are said to revive fruit brandies

Not only Alderman Badertscher is trying to make Swiss fruit brandy more popular again. The manufacturers themselves are also doing a lot to ensure that they are increasingly sold over the counter in trendy bars and pubs in the future.

That is why Humbel has been organizing the so-called “Humbel’s Stork Trophy” for several years now, a competition for bartenders in which fruit brandy is central. In addition to renowned Swiss bartenders, a number of participants from popular German bars also took part in the competition and created cocktails based on fruit brandy.

The Bernese bartender Lukas Hostettler (43) is on the jury of the “Ooievaarstrofee”. He explains: “As a main ingredient, the local fruit brandies are very expensive.” This is due to the relatively high effort and large amount of fruit required. “But also the high quality,” says the head of the “Abflugbar” in Bern’s old town. You can use cheaper brandy from abroad, but that flavor is often much too dominant as the main ingredient.

But to give a drink the right “taste”, you can certainly use well-dosed Swiss fruit brandy. “And in fact, there’s a trend in the bar scene right now,” says Hostettler, giving distillers hope.

Winner’s Cocktail “Humbelstilz”

By the way, bartender Tilman Ritz won in the summer of 2022 with the following recipe:

5 cl XZH Extra Plum x Elderberry
2cl Pineau des Charentes
2cl Amaro delle Alpi
2 cl verjuice
1 spray Les Trois Rois Aromatic Bitters

Source:Blick