In St. Louis, we have a couple of excellent monthly local food magazines. Last month I did a small shoot for one of them, Feast Magazine, and the images are in the April issue. I wanted to share a few more images from the session.
Edelbrand Pure Distilling is a husband and wife team that make authentic fruit brandies at their small farm located out past New Melle in Marthasville, Missouri. Martin Weber and Lynn Delean-Weber. These brandies, or vinars are common in Switzerland, where Martin is from.
Edelbrand makes a variety of fruit flavors, with pear, apple, cherry and plum, among them. They purchase the fruits either directly from out of state producers, or at the Soulard Market in downtown St. Louis. They use a hand cranked machine to create a mash from the fruit, which sits in barrels in their small production room for differing amounts of time, depending on the fruit. The hoses in the image below allows carbon dioxide to escape the barrel, and the jar with the water is a seal so that oxygen can’t get back in there.
Martin has two stills if I remember correctly. When the time is right, the mash goes into the still and cooked. The steam with the alcohol travels through the pipe and is collected into glass jugs.
They also separate the “heads” and the “tails” while doing that, which are the first and last amounts of liquid that are distilled. They taste bad and are poisonous.
The alcohol in the jugs is sometimes double distilled which will increase the clarity of the liquid. It is then mixed with water to bring the alcohol level of the final product down to 40% or so. They hand bottle and label the brandies in their production room, which is a small section of a barn on the property. The day I was there, they had set up for a fondue party that night, which provided a perfect background for the product shots of the various bottles.
A really nice couple, and a great product. You can find the vinars at local resellers, as well as being featured at restaurants like Stone Soup Cottage in Cottleville.
Here’s the cover of the Feast Magazine April issue (also a gorgeous food image), as well as my images in use. You can read the online version of the story here: http://www.feastmagazine.com/drink/drink_mid-missouri/article_271bf13a-2d25-11e8-886d-cb7845b4722f.html
Thanks to Feast Magazine and Lynn and Martin!
