Summer Here Kids – It's Back!

After years and years of customer requests, it's finally back: the only legit peach "whiskey" on the market.

When I met Davorin Kuchan for the first time years ago, I tasted his wonderful line of fruit eau de vie and I told him, "if you make a real peach brandy, not a peach flavored brandy, but an authentic barrel-aged product, you're going to be a huge star in the cocktail world." If you check through classic cocktail manuals like the "Savoy" or "How To Mix Drinks", you'll find numerous recipes that call for apricot or peach whiskey, and they're not referring to the flavored liqueurs available these days. Truth be told, there just wasn't anyone willing to make the stuff anymore because it's a GIANT pain in the ass. Luckily for us, you can still get this locally made, authentic peach brandy at K&L starting today. It just sings of real stonefruit and the flavors marry beautifully with the oak barrel influence. Going into the 4th of July weekend, if you want a small piece of American history, this is a small pre-Prohibition renaissance in a half bottle. 

Why does no one make this anymore, you ask? Let me break it down for you: Davorin Kuchan has to drive up to the Sierra mountains and get truck loads of peaches and drive them to his distillery in Belmont. Then he has to de-pit the tons and tons peaches by hand (he's not a peach farmer or canner, so he doesn't have that equipment). Then he has to press them, ferment them, and distill them which is an incredibly sticky and messy process and takes days to clean up once it's done. Then he has to barrel-age the teeny, tiny little bit of actual brandy spirit that he gets from that distillation, which only evaporates further over time. The result is this incredibly affordable peach brandy that is the only LEGIT "peach whiskey" on the American market - as in NOT flavored with peaches, but actually distilled from nothing but peaches and put into a barrel. It's not very cost effective and it's not very profitable either. Hence, Davorin doesn't make much of it these days (which is why I grabbed five cases of it this morning on my way in to work!).

So happy 4th of July weekend! I'm on my way to Vegas with a bottle in tow. If you want to drink something uniquely American that smells and tastes of summer, this is the bottle for you.

-David Driscoll

David Driscoll