From the Kreuz inn to a Black Forest house distillery.

Schladerer is a fruit-spirits distillery in Staufen im Breisgau, in the Breisgau, on the edge of the Black Forest. The company, whose full name is the Alfred Schladerer Schwarzwälder Hausbrennerei, dates itself to 1844, and trade reports such as about-drinks.com in 2020 and the Italian agency EFA News in 2024 repeat that year as its founding.

German Wikipedia tells a slightly longer story. It traces the family’s distilling to Sixtus Balthasar Schladerer, born in Bamlach on the Upper Rhine, who it says began distilling fruit in his father’s house in 1813. His son, also called Sixtus Schladerer, moved to Staufen in 1844, married the daughter of the owner of the Kreuz inn and ran a distillery at the inn. That move is the date the brand carries.

For decades the distillery was one part of an inn-keeping business. German Wikipedia says Hermann Schladerer took over the inn in 1876, and that it became the Kreuz-Post. The turn towards distilling as the main trade came with the next generation: Alfred Schladerer, whose name the company still bears, joined in 1919, leased the Kreuz-Post and moved the focus of the business to the distillery, according to the same article.

The house range is built around the fruit of the region. German Wikipedia lists the core eaux-de-vie as Himbeergeist (raspberry), Kirschwasser, Mirabelle and Williams pear, alongside a plum brandy, an Obstler and a line of liqueurs. In 2023, about-drinks.com reported, the company reorganised its specialities range, which includes a brandy of the Zibarte, a small wild plum native to the southern Black Forest that the distillery says local enthusiasts call “Zibärtle.” In its own descriptions the company says it makes its fruit spirits with water from its own spring and without added sugar.

A square bottle, handmade paper and a red seal.

The Schladerer bottle is the brand. According to German Wikipedia, Alfred Schladerer developed the distillery’s square bottle in 1932 together with a graphic designer from Stuttgart, and the design was registered as a trademark in 1939. The same article describes the bottle still in use as clear glass, square, with relief work, dressed with a three-part label on handmade paper and a red seal; the seal repeats the company crest that also appears on the cork.

The company treats that shape as its signature. A company statement published by about-drinks.com in March 2020 called the square Schladerer bottle the house’s trademark and tied it to the family’s commitment to selected fruit and solid craftsmanship. A company text published in September 2023 described the house as bringing its fruit brandies and other spirits together “under one seal.”

The present website, according to its legal notice, was conceived and built by the agency Münchrath Ideen+Medien. In 2020 the house also added a non-alcoholic product, an aperitif called Vincent, which German Wikipedia records citing the trade title Spirituosen Journal.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all calvados and fruit-spirit names: Roger Groult, Adrien Camut, Massenez, Schladerer, Reisetbauer, Capovilla and Clear Creek. Calvados and fruit-spirit distillers in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a restaurant list.

A calvados or fruit-spirit brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its spirits are actually distilled and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its spirits are made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family company, and a partner in Bassano.

Schladerer has stayed in the family. German Wikipedia says that after Alfred Schladerer the company, by then converted into a limited company (GmbH), was led by his wife Greta; in 1980 leadership passed to Nicolaus Schladerer-Ulmann, Alfred’s godson, whom Greta had adopted, and in 2011 his son Philipp Schladerer-Ulmann became sole managing director, a handover the Badische Zeitung reported in July 2011. The company describes Philipp as the sixth generation, and its legal notice, consulted in October 2026, names him as managing director.

The business has stayed in Staufen while adjusting its footprint there. German Wikipedia says the family company made about two million bottles of fruit spirits in 2011, and that in 2015 and 2016, citing the Badische Zeitung, it gave up much of the land it had acquired in the town since the late 1930s, with the city of Staufen and a property company buying parts of the site. The Kreuz-Post inn, the same article says, has remained in family hands.

The distillery’s stills have occasionally served other ends. about-drinks.com reported that on 24 March 2020 Schladerer signed an agreement with the University Hospital of Freiburg to recover 12,000 litres of high-strength alcohol from its stocks by redistilling fruit spirits, which another company would turn into disinfectant for the hospital and regional pharmacies.

In recent years the house has also become a distributor. German Wikipedia, citing Spirituosen Journal of July 2023, says Schladerer took on the import and distribution of the grappa maker Nardini in Germany together with a sales agency. The arrangement runs both ways: EFA News reported in April 2024 that Distilleria Nardini had signed an agreement for the exclusive distribution of Schladerer in Italy, for the restaurant and bar trade.

For a design guide, Schladerer shows how a bottle shape fixed in the early 1930s, a paper label and a red seal can carry a family distillery across nearly two centuries without a redesign that breaks the link. Compare Nardini, the Bassano grappa house it partners with, and Massenez, the Alsace eau-de-vie distillery across the Rhine. For this guide we use seal red, Black Forest green and paper cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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