schnapps is, very loosely, a type of distilled spirit, although pinning down a precise definition is challenging. “It is easier to write about the psychology of a woman than to understand a schnapps,” the German writer Erich Maria Remarque, best known as the author of All Quiet on the Western Front, wrote in a 1924 treatise called “On the Mixing of Delicious Schnapps.” As though to clarify his meaning, he added: “Schnapps has a soul.”
We should rightly recoil at Remarque’s male chauvinism, but we must agree with him that schnapps is difficult to understand. Remarque may have been alluding to what he perceived as an inherently elusive, perhaps even supernatural, quality in the spirit, but the real challenge in getting a handle on schnapps is far more prosaic. The word, which derives from the German word Schnaps (a dram of liquor, from the Low German snappen, “to snap”) is used in Germany to mean strong liquor generally, and is applied to a great multitude of wildly varying spirits.
More narrowly, and especially among English speakers, it is most commonly used to denote two distinct, separate categories of liquor. The first is the traditional, northern European style of schnapps associated most intimately with Austria and Germany: a close kin to eau-de-vie, in which fruit supplies flavor, and no sweeteners or other superfluous ingredients are added. See eau-de-vie. Apples, apricots, cherries, pears, and plums are commonly used fruits for making schnapps—unless, of course, one is in the Netherlands, and the schnapps in question is “Schiedam schnapps,” which is a nineteenth-century trade name for ordinary genever. See genever.
The other style might most conveniently be called the artificial style, in which sweetening agents and synthetic flavorings are frequently used, sometimes to create such fanciful concoctions as butterscotch and root beer schnapps, though less outré varieties, such as sour apple and peach, are used more often in the making of cocktails.
It gets still more complicated: in the traditional style, there are two different methods of producing fruit schnapps. One applies to schnapps called Brand. The other method applies to a variety called Geist (ghost). Brand is the more prevalent of the two, and is made by fermenting fresh fruit and then distilling the resulting mash to obtain a spirit of approximately 65 percent alcohol by volume. It is stored for at least one year in open containers, then diluted with water to achieve a more palatable proportion of alcohol, approximately 40 percent.
To make schnapps of the Geist variety, fruits are added to a neutral alcohol base and left to macerate. See maceration. Then, the mixture is redistilled and diluted in the same manner as the Brand style.
The altogether different artificial variety—an American specialty, originally midwestern—comprises a loosely knit family of viscous, sweetened, flavored liqueur that bears little resemblance to its Teutonic progenitor. In drink mixing, the latter sort of schnapps is deployed in numerous cocktails, many of which are associated with the 1970s and 1980s, during which they had their heydays. Peach schnapps features in Sex on the Beach and the Woo Woo. Peppermint schnapps appears in the Golden Eagle and the Hornet. See
In the musical Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye the dairyman celebrates the arrangement of his daughter Tzeitel’s marriage to the rich, old butcher Lazar Wolf with a bit of schnapps. “We’ll raise a glass / And sip a glass of schnapps,” they sing in “To Life.”
Tzeitel winds up marrying Motel the tailor instead.
See also Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.
Kochan, Thomas. Discussion with the author, July 4, 2016.
By: Rosie Schaap