Schilkin

On a manor farm in Kaulsdorf, Schilkin has made spirits since 1932, and since 1952 the Berliner Luft has come from there. The peppermint liqueur at eighteen per cent has long been a Berlin cult drink, more than six million bottles leave each year, a third of them staying in Berlin, and at the works outlet on the yard itself a litre bottle costs 9.49 euros.

A manor farm where spirits were distilled in the seventeenth century

Schilkin sits at the southern entrance to Alt-Kaulsdorf, on a listed manor farm whose working buildings group in exposed brick around a yard. The manor house has a core from 1881 and was rebuilt after war damage. Spirits were distilled at this address as early as the seventeenth century, and in 1782 the chemist Franz Carl Achard bought the estate to test the extraction of sugar from beet here; a fire destroyed the buildings seventeen years later. Sugar and alcohol therefore each have a history of their own at this spot. The family came to Berlin in 1921 after leaving Russia following the revolution, and Apollon Schilkin bought the farm in 1932. All around stands the old village centre with an inn, a former cinema and a barn that serves as a church today; the street itself was at heart a thirteenth-century trade road between Berlin and Frankfurt an der Oder. Kaulsdorf station lies a few minutes away, and beyond it are the Kaulsdorf lakes.

The Berliner Luft and four generations

The peppermint liqueur has existed since 1952, and it takes its name from the operetta melody that Paul Lincke wrote in 1904. It holds eighteen per cent, is vegan, and because a bottle of seven tenths of a litre contains a good hundred grams of sugar it counts in law as a liqueur rather than a spirit. Bottling happens on the yard in sizes from two hundredths of a litre up to three litres, and the line manages around ten thousand bottles an hour. The company history is eventful: in 1972 the business was expropriated and carried on as a state-owned operation, with Sergei Schilkin staying on as works manager, in 1990 the family got it back, and in 2014 a protective shield procedure helped it shrink back to health. What saved the brand was a young international club crowd that turned the bottle into a cult object. Today the fourth generation runs the house with around fifty staff, and beside the Berliner Luft stand vodka to old family recipes, a dry gin, brandy and herbal liqueurs.