25 Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About Brandy

There is a rather popular list making the internet 'rounds these days: 25 Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About Brandy. So I thought we'd make it a little more age appropriate for the dignified KMMS-AM audience.

1. The name brandy comes from the Dutch word brandewijn, meaning "burnt wine."
2. Slivivitz, in Poland is made from plums (and may be the most disgusting drink to ever pass my lips)
3. Anything that will ferment can be distilled and turned into a brandy. Grapes, apples, blackberries, sugar cane, honey, milk, rice, wheat, corn, potatoes, and rye are all commonly fermented and distilled.
4. Fine brandies are required to retain the concentrated flavor of the underlying fruit.
5. Most fine brandy makers double distill their brandy, meaning they concentrate the alcohol twice.
6. It takes about 9 gal of wine to make I gal of brandy.
7. Most brandy consumed today, even fine brandy, is less than six years old.
8. Fine brandies are usually blended from many different barrels over a number of vintages.
9. Some cognacs can contain brandy from up to a 100 different barrels.
10. Sugar, to simulate age in young brandies, is added along with a little caramel to obtain a uniform color consistency across an entire production run.
11. Mass-produced brandies are manufactured to be odorless and tasteless, the only real quality control required is to check their alcohol content.
12. The origins of Brandy can be traced back to the expanding Muslem Mediterranean states in the 7th and 8th centuries.
13. Fruit Brandy is the default term for all Brandies that are made from fermenting fruit other than grapes.
14. Calvados, the Apple Brandy from the Normandy region of Northwestern France, is probably the best known type of Fruit Brandy.
15. Types of Brandies, originally at least, tended to be location-specific. (Cognac, for example, is a town and region in France that gave its name to the local Brandy.)
16. Cognacs labelled Fine Champagne are a blend of Petite and Grande Champagne.
17. Armagnac is the oldest type of Brandy in France, with documented references to distillation dating back to the early 15th century.
18. Italy has a long history of Brandy production dating back to at least the 16th century, but unlike Spain or France there are no specific Brandy-producing regions.
19. Italy produces a substantial amount of Grappa, both of the raw, firewater variety and the more elegant, artisanal efforts that are made from one designated grape type and frequently packaged in hand-blown bottles.
20. German monks were distilling Brandy by the 14th century and the German distillers had organized their own guild as early as 1588.
21. German Brandy (called weinbrand) has been made from imported wine rather than the more valuable local varieties.
22. For a time Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University, was the worlds largest brandy producer.
23. In the United States, Applejack, as Apple Brandy is called locally, is thought by many to be the first spirit produced in the British colonies.
24. This colonial tradition has continued on the East Coast with the Lairds Distillery in New Jersey (established in 1780 and the oldest distillery in America).
25. Some of the earliest thermometers used in the 1600's contained brandy instead of mercury. The liquor was eventually replaced with mercury due to the latter material's wider range of liquid-state temperature.

(Sourced from: tastings.com, encyclopedia.com, mentalfloss.com & britannica.com)