Helbing Caraway
Helbing Kümmel is a caraway schnapps (" Köm " in Low German ) from Hamburg-based Heinrich Helbing GmbH , a company of Borco-Marken-Import GmbH & Co. KG . Helbing Kümmel is made from the seeds of meadow cumin ( Carum carvi ) and grain alcohol .
According to information from Welt am Sonntag , more than 750,000 bottles of the spirit are filled each year , and the specialist publication Getränkezeitung estimates sales at around 1 million bottles a year, which are mainly consumed in northern Germany. Increasingly, however, caraway schnapps is also being consumed throughout Germany and abroad, or used for cooking and baking . Helbing is the only caraway schnapps that is exported to the USA , where it is mainly drunk by emigrants of German origin.
In Germany, Helbing Kümmel is the absolute market leader in the caraway segment with a market share of around 41% ( according to ACNielsen ) .
Helbing Kümmel is unofficially referred to as Hamburg's national drink. The caraway schnapps is served in Hamburg's town hall on all official occasions.
history
The history of Heinrich Helbing GmbH goes back to the Helbing family of schnapps distillers and brewers who lived in Gangloffsömmern in Thuringia . The son Samuel Ernst Helbing, born in 1730, later moved to Dresden , where he met the businessman Heinrich Carl von Schimmelmann , the owner of Ahrensburg Castle . When Schimmelmann was looking for a schnapps distiller and brewer, he remembered his friend Helbing, brought him to Ahrensburg and assigned him the task of distilling a "typical north German schnapps". In his search for regional flavors, Helbing came across caraway. Initially tenant of the distillery and brewery of Gut Wandsbek , which was also owned by Schimmelmann, Helbing was granted the basic inheritance right to distillery and brewery in 1778. Samuel Ernst Helbing's second son, Johann Christian Helbing , bought the estate brewery in Wandsbek near Hamburg from his father in 1801 , while the first son, Carl Matthias Helbing , inherited the " Hopfenkarre " brewery in Wandsbek , which had meanwhile also been acquired .
As the second son of Carl Mattias Helbing, Johann Peter Hinrich Helbing, also a master distiller, was later unable to take over his father's brewery. On February 14, 1836, he then founded his own Helbingsche Dampfkornbrennerei and further developed his grandfather's recipes for what is now known as Helbing Kümmel . After the company's founder died in 1857, the business was bogging down due to disagreements within the family, before the second youngest son Christoph Heinrich Helbing (born 1832) took over the distillery in 1861 and integrated yeast production as a second mainstay. In addition, Christoph Heinrich Helbing (born 1832) used the distillery's waste products as feed for farm animals and built up an agricultural estate in Wandsbek and Barmbek , which he named Sophienhof after his wife Sophie Margarete Helbing, née Holst .
After the sudden death of Christoph Heinrich Helbing (born 1832) at the age of 54 on October 10, 1886, his widow Sophie Margarete Helbing took over the company with around 400 employees together with her eldest son Christoph Heinrich Helbing (born 1863) and two sons-in-law and 14 steam engines and was considered the largest spirits company in the German Empire three years later at the Paris World Exhibition in 1889 . At the end of the 19th century the company had offices in Liverpool , London and Paris .
Shortly before the turn of the century, the family company became a stock corporation called Helbingsche Dampf-Kornbrennerei und Presshefe-Fabriken AG and was integrated into Ostwerke AG in 1919 and renamed Heinrich Helbing GmbH within this holding company . In 1927 Heinrich Helbing GmbH was affiliated with Norddeutsche Hefewerke GmbH , from which Deutsche Hefewerke GmbH became one of the largest yeast producers in Europe.
In 1974 the Hamburg family Matthiesen, as owners of the company Borco-Marken-Import Matthiesen GmbH & Co. KG, took over the distillery and the Helbing brand and has been in charge of Heinrich Helbing GmbH ever since .
While various spirits were available on the market under the name Helbing around the turn of the century, only Helbing Kümmel was recently produced. This only changed in 2015, when the company Borco-Marken-Import continued the tradition and revived old recipes with Helbing Aquavit and, from 2019, Margarete's fine double juniper.
The trademark ( water carrier ) of Helbing Kümmel is derived from the Hamburg original Hans Hummel .
Sources (press)
- Beverages newspaper , issue 5/2007
- Financial Times Deutschland , August 11, 2006 edition
- Welt am Sonntag , issue of November 18, 2007
- HA Prinz Reuss: 125 years of Helbing - the anniversary book , Hamburg 2011