Fruit Brandy Flavor Profile: Fruit Forward, Clean Finish

Fruit brandy is fragile. Its most important character lives at the front of the mouth. That also means it is easy to ruin: a tails-heavy back end can overpower fruitiness fast.

Use the grid to check the expected fruit brandy profile and test store-bought bottles for late tails. Then run a correction challenge you can do on a small still.

Quick summary

The expected two-dimensional profile

Fruit brandy (and some lighter gins) is two-dimensional: medium intensity at the front of mouth, strong intensity in the middle, and little to no back-end tails.

So I didn't write down front of mouth, middle of mouth, back of mouth, first second, seconds two to six, anything beyond six or seven seconds. Taste intensity one, light flavors, medium flavors, and number three, very heavy flavors. And that's my second example that you want to test.

You don't have to do this all in one week or weekend. You can sort of say like, let's take a bit of rest and let's migrate to the next one. And in general, it's quite easy also to identify where the mistakes are.

The common mistake: an unwanted back end

A common fruit brandy mistake described is a surprising third dimension: tails flavors showing up late in the throat. Because tails-associated flavors are heavy, they can dominate the overall experience.

We see a medium flavor profile at the beginning and a heavy flavor profile at the middle. This product apparently doesn't have a back end. So it hits you at the front in the first second.

It really hits you in the middle, seconds two through six. After six, seven, eight seconds, nothing happens. Now, this could be a gin or this could be a fruit brandy.

How to test it (counting seconds)

Take a sip, coat the inside of your mouth, swallow, and start counting. If anything shows up after six or seven seconds, treat that as tails-associated flavor. It can show up as back-of-throat burn and heavy, earthy character.

So you can have a few gins or you can buy a few fruit brandies and see if you get those flavor profiles. Not all fruit brandies are created equal. Amazing for a gin that goes together with tonic.

But especially with a fruit brandy, if you increase the level of head smearing, of course, you also increase the level of headache that you're going to wake up with tomorrow. But for example this is a quite OK graph for a two-dimensional gin or for a fruit brandy. What are the mistakes that we very often see with fruit brandy?

A practical correction run

The challenge given is to buy a few real fruit brandies (not vodka with added flavorings), profile them, then rerun one on a small still.

Dilute the spirit to about 25% with water, run it again, and cut tails earlier by stopping sooner (a range like 95–96°C is used as an example). Then dilute back to about 40% (or to the original strength), rest it for a few days, and compare the improved fruit clarity.

You can do the same with vodka: rerun and cut more heads if the front end is too fruity.

One of the mistakes that we very often see with fruit brandy is that even if they follow the classical pattern, is that there is a lot of back end happening. And do you remember how the head seed, the fruity flavors, are responsible for 30% of the total flavor? And how the substrate is only doing 20% of the flavors?

But basically, that it's the tails associated flavors that have most of the esters in them are much heavier. And especially in a fruit brandy or in a lighter category gin, it's those earthy and rooty flavors that very simply, very easily, can overpower the fruity front that you're looking for in those two products. Very often, you see that fruit brandies have that very extra dimension.

Key Takeaways