In mid-June, Gabriel Galliker-Etter always gets a little nervous. This is when the cherries are harvested by the 65 farmers around Lake Zug, who then deliver their cherries to the Etter Distillery in Zug. «Kirsch is the supreme discipline», according to CEO Galliker-Etter, who completed his apprenticeship at the traditional company and has been managing the family-run business for ten years along with his wife, as the fourth generation to do so. Producing good kirsch requires" around 15 kilograms of fruit for 700 ml of distillate. The season is short, and if it hails shortly before harvesting, this can mean bad news for the distillery. The art, explains Galliker-Etter, lies in the fact that «you have to process the fruit quickly, leave the stones intact and then ensure the work is done very precisely during the distillation process» . 24 hours after the baskets full of cherries have been collected from the farmers, they have to be in the fermentation process to get a pure brandy with intensive flavour. But there is still a long way to go to get to that point. «We age our kirsch for at least three years, and for as long as 7 years for single-variety kirsch» , says Gabriel Galliker-Etter. This is another reason why their first taste of kirsch makes a lot of people sorry that they didn't try it sooner, explains the distillery manager, succinctly summing up the love of cherry brandy.