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The first ingredients: blueberries and sugar.
Since coming to Slovenia, I’ve gone from “Never drinking fruity apéritifs” to “Drinking twice my body weight in fruity apéritifs every weekend.”
Sipping a borovnica (blueberry schnapps) is de reigueur at traditional Slovenian meals. It’s something of a ritual. By accepting one from your host, you enter into a sacred covenant: You signal your willingness to eat and drink to maximum capacity, and your host accepts the responsibility to do everything he can to completely and utterly wreck your digestive system.
In the summer, which is a season that sometimes happens in Slovenia but sometimes not, you’ll often see bottles of dark liquid suntanning on people’s balconies. This is usually homemade borovnica, or some variant thereof: viÅ¡nja (sour cherry schnapps), or a liquor made with some other fruit: blackberries, wild strawberries, etc… It’s very easy to do. Here’s one way.
First, you’ll need the ingredients: white sugar, fresh blueberries, and alcohol. Then you’ll need to clean the blueberries. This can be a bit of a pain.
Washing away their sins.
If you want your schnapps to contain a lot of berries, you’ll need to be careful to pick out all the leaves and stems. Be aware that this is a time-consuming process. If you want it “clear” or “fruitless,” or if you have, say, two young children at home, and one of them has bronchitis again so he’s constantly waking up and coughing and you don’t have the time and energy to clean the stupid berries, and the boy keeps interrupting things anyway so you just want to finish things up and get some sleep, then just rinse the blueberries and move on to the next step. Which is:
Building a tower of power.
Layer the blueberries and sugar in a bottle. The amount of sugar determines the sweetness, obviously, but don’t be too shy with the white stuff. We generally use a ratio of 1:1, and (contrary to expectations) the final product doesn’t taste sickeningly sweet. Fill up the bottle about 3/4 of the way up and get ready for the next and easiest step.
Here comes the sun, doo doo doo doo.
Leave the bottle out in the sun and just let the sugar melt. If you live in Slovenia you might need to travel abroad for this step. Just ask your local travel agent if he can recommend a place that has an orb-like thing called a sonce (sun). When the sugar melts, you’ll eventually have a half-full bottle of sludge. Now comes the essential part.
Gallons of alcohol flow into the bottle.
Fill up the remainder of the bottle with alcohol. Of course, a true professional would also make their own alcohol, but that’s out of my league. We use good ol’ Serbian-made slivovitz. Now that all the ingredients are together the way God intended them to be, you’re pretty much finished.
Stir it, don’t shake it.
Stir things up, close the bottle and put it in a dark place. (Basements are perfect — just be careful it doesn’t come into contact with the dead bodies you have down there.) When it’s ready, you’ll have your very own bottle of borovnica!
Needless to say, this is just one way of preparing the stuff. And I can’t be held liable if you decapitate yourself or otherwise hurt yourself making this. If anyone wants to share some of their tips, or secret production method, please do so in the comments!
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Cool! I did this without the sugar last year and vodka not Slivo which has too much of it’s own taste and is WAAAY too expensive in the Yakima Gulag anyway. I do this with roses and vodka too. Very good for colds!
While we are on the subject of medicine - my mum invented her own recipe against sore throat a couple of years ago: fir bud schnapps, which is prepared with very young fir buds instead of blueberries in the same way as above. Actually, fir bud syrup (the same without alcohol) is a well-known cure for sore throat around here, only it tastes …. well … not that great. We all found that putting some alcohol in it is a great improvement to the taste
and use it with great pleasure from then on.
Very interesting article, but I think there is tiny weeny mistake in it. Borovnica is not a blueberry brandy (at least not in my region). Borovnica is simply the fruit, a blueberry. Blueberry brandy is called borovniÄ?evec. Same goes for viÅ¡nja - it is a sour cherry, while sour cherry brandy (or maraschino) is called viÅ¡njevec. Schnapps is a spirit made of plums and it doesn’t have anything to do with blueberries or any other kind of fruit, even though sometimes schnapps as a word is used to point out the low quality of a spirit drink - which borovniÄ?evec and viÅ¡njevec certainly are not.
Technically Deckard is correct. However, saying “borovnice” instead of “borovniÄ?evec” (especially in a bar) denotes an experienced custommer, much along the lines of saying “Stones” instead of “The Rolling Stonens”. But the most widely used coloquialism for the beverage of the day is “borovniÄ?ke”. Oh, and Michael: a great post! I didn’t know how to make “borovniÄ?ke” until today. Now I’m copy/pasting this post to the Pengovsky’s Secret Archives.
Lovely post! I shall try this at the very first occasion!
We produce our own orehovec (nut brandy) with - of course! - our own grape schnapps (my dad actually produces quite a few bottles of it every year for personal use).
We usually use the orehovec for cooking purposes (eg. enhance the smell and taste of the famous potica).
How you can make your own orehovec:
- 15 green nuts
- 400 g of sugar
- 1 vanilin sugar
- 1 lemon
- 1 orange
- 10 coffee beans
- 5-10 cloves
- 1 - 1,5 l of schnapps
Cut the nuts into quarters, then cut the lemon and the orange on rings. Place everything into a large jar, add all the rest of the ingredients, close well and put on sun for at least 4 weeks. During this time mix your future orehovec several times so that the ingredients can soak and the sugar melts. After 4 weeks, filter the mixture and pour the liquid into a bottle.
opinion
Hehehe, oldie but goodie
I have to agree here with Pengovsky….the same in my region. BorovniÄ?ke (for experienced users) and borovniÄ?evec (for tourists).
For alcohol we use homemade slivovka (schnnaps/plum spirit)which taste goes nicely with bluebarries.
Another thing…..I absolutely hate when you order it somewhere and they give you 0.03 with two blueberries inside. The best thing about borovniÄ?evec are the blueberries soaked from alcohol which have to be served in aboundance.
…thus providing you not only with a healthy amount of alcochol, but also with a heathly meal. Calories AND a fruit diet… where else can you get a combination like that… Perhaps only in tequila with a worm in it
mmm borovniÄ?ke
there is also a variant called rumtopf, or rumov lonec, where you use layers and leyers of different fruits in exchange with sugar and then overflow it with rum. But somehow me likes borovniÄ?ke better
Finally something a man can use to kill the sins that he has committed by not being a women. God bless you and may all your children be masculine children
I have developed a real taste for borovnica, both the juice and the homemade brandy, during a recent trip to Serbia where we were joined by relatives from Slovenia. The Serbs got me hooked on the juice and the Slovenian lot on the fortified version! Blueberries. Bloody great things!
I finally went to Slovenia in 2001 to meet with my long-lost relatives, and let’s just say I developed a taste for this stuff while there. I had my first sip in a lodge looking down at the lake in Bohinj, and I haven’t been the same since. I have made many batches of my own since then, and the recipe has been tweaked over the years. It’s similar to yours, but I always add just a little lemon juice. I like the refreshing hint of tartness it adds. Now my family won’t let me stop making it!
Cheers! Love your website. It’s my link until I can make it back to SLO.
As it happens, I was taught the same kind of method with redwood nuts and vodka from a Siberian gymnast many years ago and with succes I’ve now a bottle of sour cherry vodka in the making, stored in my fridge until new year. It’s already looking very promising, but I think I’ll be able to restrain myself, even though I could use some cough medicine right now (ever went to Spain to contract flu? I did just now :-P)…
There is a nice thing about the cherry versions of this, and that is that you can put them in a cough medicine bottle! I used to do that with Maraschino when I went to speech tournaments, and I never did worse than honorable mention! keeps the voice in order nicely! :)I’d put it in a Cherry Nyquil bottle and no one was the wiser! xaxaxaxaxaxa!