Pear-in-the-Bottle Pear Brandy

Pear-in-the-Bottle:

In addition to normally bottled Pear Brandy, we do a special bottling of Pear-in-the-bottle. To make pear-in-the-bottle we actually grow the pear inside of the bottle in our orchards, and then fill it with our pear Eau-de-Vie.This practice of growing pears in the bottle is traditional in Alsace where pear brandy has been made for hundreds of years. Pear-in-the-bottle is highly labor intensive, requiring weeks of work both putting the bottles on the tree at the beginning of the summer when the fruit are small and removing them when the pears are fully mature. Since we use no preservatives or artificial cleaning solutions each pear and each bottle must be painstakingly scrubbed by hand before the pear brandy is added. Due to the unpredictable nature of pear growth from year-to-year the pear in the bottle is only available certain years.