A Still Next Door, a Story in Every Bottle

There is a particular smell that hits you when you walk through the door of the Kupfereule distillery. It is part fruit orchard, part warm metal, part something harder to name — the smell of patience, maybe, or of something slowly becoming what it is meant to be. I have never quite managed to put it into words without sounding slightly ridiculous, but every guest who has come down for a tasting knows exactly what I mean the moment they step inside.

Kupfereule means “copper owl” in German — a name that fits the character of what we make here: precise, quiet, a little old-fashioned in the best possible sense. The still itself is copper, of course, and it has its own kind of presence. It catches the light from the south-facing window, and on a clear morning you can see the mountain peaks to the south reflected faintly in the curved metal. I find it one of the most beautiful things on the property, and I grew up here.

Why a Hotel Distillery?

The honest answer is that it is an extension of everything we already believe in the kitchen.

When I came back to Fliesserhof in 2022 after years working in Copenhagen — at kitchens like A.O.C. and Marchal, where provenance mattered for everything from the butter to the herbs — I could not shake the question: where does this come from, and who made it? That question is easy to answer when you are sourcing vegetables from a local farm or pressing oil from Tyrolean seeds. It gets harder with spirits. Most bottles on a hotel bar arrive from somewhere far away, processed into something smooth and interchangeable.

The Kupfereule is our attempt to close that loop. We grow fruit, we harvest it, we ferment it, we distill it, and we serve it — here, to you, in the apartment house just next door to the hotel where it was made. There is no shorter distance between field and glass.

What We Make

Our fruit brandies are the backbone of everything: apple, pear, and plum, each made from locally sourced fruit at the peak of its season. The pear brandy is the one that surprises people most. It has this delicate, almost floral quality — nothing like the blunt heat you might expect from a schnapps. If you hold the glass for a moment before you drink, you can smell the orchard before the first sip even arrives.

The plum is darker, richer, with a depth that lingers. It is the one I tend to reach for after a long day in the kitchen when the last guests have gone and the dining room has gone quiet.

Then there are the liqueurs: black currant, cherry, and stone pine — Zirbe in German, one of the most alpine of all flavours. If you have never tasted Zirbe, it is one of those things that is genuinely difficult to describe: resinous, warm, slightly sweet, with a green-wood quality that makes you think of high mountain air. Our stone pine liqueur is a deep amber colour, somewhere between a whisky and a forest. It is, without question, my favourite thing we produce.

Small Batches, Deliberately

We make around 600 bottles a year. That is not a lot — we have the capacity to make five times that number, but more bottles would mean shortcuts I am not willing to take. It would mean less time spent watching each batch, less attention to the fruit, less care at every stage of the process.

There is something about working at this scale that I find deeply satisfying — the same satisfaction I get from a menu that changes every week because the ingredients are only right for a short window of time. You cannot stockpile a season. You make what the harvest gives you, and then that vintage is gone.

This is why the Kupfereule is not something you can easily buy elsewhere. What ends up in the bottle is a direct expression of a particular place, a particular year, and a particular way of doing things.

Come and Taste It

If you are curious about how any of this is made, we offer distillery tours and tastings during your stay. You will get to see the still, smell the raw distillate, and try the finished products side by side. I always try to join for a part of it when I can — the questions guests ask are genuinely some of my favourite conversations of the week.

And of course, everything we produce is available at the Chrysalis Bar, our cocktail bar nestled in the restaurant area with sweeping views over the mountain landscape — and just steps from our panorama terrace, where the valley opens up before you. Open each afternoon and evening. Our bartender uses the Kupfereule spirits as the base for several signature cocktails — the stone pine liqueur in particular works beautifully in a long, cold drink on a summer evening, terrace doors open, the mountains catching the last of the light.

If you would like to visit and try it for yourself, we would love to have you. There is a glass with your name on it somewhere in the distillery next door.