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How to Make Brandied Cherries

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Each summer, for a short window, neighboring orchards positively drip with ripe sweet cherries – blushing yellow Ranier Cherries, and Bing Cherries of such a dark maroon they almost look black.  We eat as many as we can fresh, until they stain our mouths and our fingers, and I preserve the rest.  I freeze many, dry a few, and I always make brandied cherries – consider them a grown-up maraschino.

Making Brandied Cherries

At their simplest, Brandied Cherries need only a handful of ingredients: cherries, brandy and sugar.  But never one to let good enough alone, I also add sour cherry juice and a few spices.  Sometimes I drop in a few star anise pods, other summers I add cloves.  This summer, I dropped in a few vanilla bean pods and ceylon cinnamon sticks.

Selecting Your Cherries

Ranier cherries, a yellow fruit with a lovely red-hued blush, and the dark Bing cherries arrive at our farmers market in late June or early July, lasting only a few weeks.  While I use a mix of both Ranier and Bing cherries, any sweet cherry will work in their stead, and many sour cherries will do nicely  as well.

Preserving with Brandy and Sugar

I preserve most of my foods for the long winter ahead by means of fermentation (and you can find most of my fermented foods recipes here, as well as take an online course in fermentation here).  I also love to use my dehydrator to make green veggie powder, but my favorite (and most indulgent) way to preserve summer’s bounty is by means of sugar and booze.  Both of which infuse the sweet cherries with their flavor, and help to preserve their inherent flavors and freshness.

Any brandy will do, but I typically make my Brandied Cherries with cognac, that is when I can’t find locally made brandy.  It’s a bit more expensive, but it also produces superior flavor. I also take care to use unrefined cane sugar (available here), which lends both sweetness and a burst of minerals.

Spice

Each summer I drop a few spices into the jars of fruit marinating in sweetened booze: star anise, cloves, ginger root.  This year, I used Ceylon cinnamon (which offers sweeter cinnamon notes than the brash heat of cassia) as well as vanilla bean.  I purchase both through Mountain Rose Herbs which specializes in affordable, ethically and sustainably sourced spices.

Soaking Up the Sun

Lastly I let the cherries and spice marinate in the sweetened brandy for at least a month in the windowsill in my kitchen, agitating the jar once a week.  The warmth of the sun helps to infuse the cherries with the flavor of the alcohol, sugar and spice, and within a month to six week’s their ready for a transfer to a cold dark cupboard where they’ll stay for about a year without losing quality.  We serve them dropped into cocktails, and spooned over ice cream, taking the opportunity to savor not only the cherries, but also their leftover juice.

Thinking about preserving?

Tell me in the comments what you plan to make this season, because I have a pretty big surprise for you next week.

Brandied Cherries
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Prep time:
Total time:
Serves: 1 quart
Each summer, for a short window, neighboring orchards positively drip with ripe sweet cherries - blushing yellow Raniers, and Bings that are such a dark maroon they almost look black.
Ingredients
Instructions
  1. Pluck the stems from the cherries, but keep the pits in, and drop the fruit into a quart-sized jar. Arrange the cinnamon stick and vanilla beans among the cherries.
  2. Place a medium saucepan on the stove over medium heat, and pour in the sour cherry juice, brandy and sugar. Warm the liquids together with the sugar until it dissolves completely, then remove it from the heat and pour it over the cherries. Seal the jars, and let the jar sit on a sunny windowsill in your kitchen for at least one month and up to six weeks, shaking the jar once a week, before transferring them to a dark cupboard. Eat them within one year.

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Reader Interactions

What people are saying

  2. To make this recipe non-alcoholic, sometimes I use cherry juice with a bit of balsamic vinegar to replace red wine while cooking. Do you think that would work for this preserving recipe? To replace the alcohol with more juice, a bit of balsamic and keep all the spices? It looks really nice thank you!

    • No, that would not preserve the cherries. Though I think you might be able to preserve them in straight vinegar. Alcohol acts as a preservative.

  3. I am very excited to try this. But is there a fermentation going on? Do we need to burp the jars each week. Do the jars not explode? I have had exploded Kombucha, and it ain’t funny!

  4. OMG! These remind me of childhood – maraschino cherries? Maybe they’re the perfect adult excuse for a childhood reunion! thank you 🙂

  5. Sounds super yummy! Thanks for sharing! Is there a reason for leaving the pits in? I would rather do the work all at once up front rather than try to remember to remind guests and whoever else is eating it later if it won’t affect the end results…

    • The pits give a little flavor to the cherries, and you can use pitted cherries, but I prefer them with pits in.

  8. Doesn’t heating the brandy cause the alcohol to burn off? The boiling temp of alcohol is lower than that of water, and the boiling temp of sugar water is much higher than the boiling temp of water. Am I to understand that we are barely heating the sauce ingredients together?

    I am *totally* going to try this! I have a 10-pound tub of sour cherries on order from a local farm.

    Already I have canned a gallon of strawberry jam, and I am likely to can sliced peaches in my own maple syrup sauce. I will definitely do applesauce in the fall (Cortland for preference, usually 20-30 quarts), and maybe either tomato sauce or salsa. Canned fresh sweet corn is pretty popular around here, too, although I am not sure if I’ll be doing it this year yet. (A sack of 60 ears is decently manageable for my group.) And pickles! I am growing pickling cukes this year, and I have about a hundred flowers out there, so it should be a great batch of dill pickles.

    • You just warm it enough to dissolve the sugar, not burn off the alcohol. It’s still plenty, plenty boozy!

  9. Yumm! This has inspired me to make brandied jocotes. I live in El Salvador, and I call jocotes the plum of central america.
    I also plan on making green papaya pickles, and green mango pickles!

  10. After years of making brandied cherries i found out they will stay crisp if you leave a bit of stem on, just clip it if you wish. They still absorb all the nu
    mmie flavor.

  13. Yum on the brandied cherries!

    As to your question about what plans do I have for preserving? I can’t wait until my cucumbers are ready so I can make fermented pickles again. I had a crop failure last year so it has been much too long!

  14. I’m neck deep in mangos at the moment. Freezing, dehydrating, eating fresh. Later I’ll take some of the frozen ones and make jam. I’ve also saved all the juice and I’m going to try my hand at fruit leather.

  15. These sound scrumptious! I’m putting up snow peas, sugar snap peas, green beans, peaches, apricots, blueberries, plums, etc this season.

  17. This looks perfect. We have 5 gallons of sour cherries waiting for us to do SOMETHING with them. Besides eating we are drying a few ( very time intensive) and freezing . Have you ever make jam with cherries?

  19. I,m just too jealous that , here in CT, we don,t have commercial cherry orchards. Used to have a cherry tree in our yard when I was growing up. That looks so yummy.
    I will be fermenting cukes, carrots, and cabbage from my garden this year. Does one ferment green beans?
    Am planning to have a fermentation party in the fall to introduce some friends to the process.

  20. I tried looking for locally made brandy on the Internet but didn’t get any links for it. Any ideas? I saw that you mentioned that you do this in your recipe.

  21. Looks super tasty!! Do you think bourbon would be a tasty/workable substitute in this recipe? (No brandy in the house but we do have a big ol’ jug of bourbon…)

  22. I LOVE cherries and this looks like an elegant Christmas gift. I made a double batch yesterday, and they’re sitting on a sunny windowsill as instructed. I see in another comment that you say they’re not fermented, but mine seem to be fermenting. There are tons of bubbles moving up in the jars and when I open them, a little air releases and the juice bubbles up. All that in just one day. Is that normal? I, too, am afraid they might explode.

    • I saw the exact same thing with mine, Veronica. Put them up yesterday, and this afternoon checked the jar for pressure… and it hissed at me. I have mine in a Fido, so I’m not too worried about explosions, but I wasn’t expecting to see all those bubbles, either.

  23. I see that the sour cherry juice you linked to is concentrated. Do you use 1/2 cup of that straight or do you dilute a certain amount with water to reconstitute?

  24. I am sad to say I missed cherry season where I live. 🙁 I was wondering if this could be made with blueberries as well?

      • See my original comment below. My cherries are also fizzing, but for six cups of liquid (we had a double recipe) we only used 1/2 cup of sugar. Could that be the reason? Since this is Day #1 of the process, is it too late to add more sugar?
        Thanks!

        • Michelle,
          Doubling the recipe, but using only a half cup of sugar is a pretty big deviation from the recipe. It’s most likely not enough sugar to preserve the fruit, so they’re fermenting. You could probably ad the remaining sugar now though, dissolving it into the liquid.

  26. Will the alcohol still preserve it without the sugar? I can’t have any sugar right now, only honey.

  28. Hi, I am going down the road now to the farm stand to grab some cherries!

    One question..Is the sour cherry juice required for proper storage or is it just for flavor?

    Thanks!

  29. I just bought 4 lbs. of cherries from the market, but I don’t have sour cherry juice. Can I leave that out or substitute with fresh lemon juice?

  30. Hi I made these last week (so easy!!!) and another batch today. I looked at the batch I made last week and it appears that some of the cherries are rotting. The only thing I substituted was organic cane sugar for unrefined cane sugar. I have them sitting in a south facing window, although with the sun straight overhead, they’re not getting a whole lot of sun. What else could i be doing wrong? Thanks.

  31. So excited about my brandies cherries! Just finished 8 quarts and I can’t wait to eat them!!
    Thanks for a great recipe:)

  32. The cherries sound delicious, can’t wait to try! This year so far, I’ve made red currant and black currant jam from our bushes. Gooseberries I used in gooseberry/apple pies, blueberry crop disappointing this year.

  33. I made these and they are delicious but , they shriveled up quite a bit in a short time . I have several jars made for gifts and would hate if they were rotting on me .will they be okay ? I read that cherries should be brined before doing this . While I don’t like th extra salt from a brine , it would be better than losing all of my product . Just made some with stems to see if that makes a difference .

  35. Hi Jenny, I have a large jar on my counter these last 2 weeks and when I went to shake it, I see that some cherries are floating above the water! The ones floating look slightly rotted…would I just chuck the floaters or eat them or chuck it all? It was pretty costly to make this up since cherries were $5 a pound and the liquor was 20!

  36. Does anyone know? Please help! I have done research on fermenting since then and see that foods should be weighted and kept below the liquid but is this true for this recipe? There is no mention of it. I’m not sure if it is assumed that people have experience with this sort of food preservation….?

  38. I’m still trying to get a response to my question. I emailed your website and posted here several times. Please help!

  39. Hi jenny, I’m wondering what can I do with the cherries afterwards? I made liquor every year and I get really sad when I have to toss those cherries… Well I eat all I can… But I wish I could make something with them too… A pie? Marmalade?… Thanks.

    • I pat dry them with a paper towel and then dip them each in melted dark chocolate. Very nummy!

      • I juat picked 2kg of cherries from a local tree. I have stoned them all and put most of them ito jars to make cherry brandy for Christmas. I was wondering what to do with the rest….. now I know. I may have to go and pick some more so I can leave the stalks on. I bet they would look pretty on a dessert plate if you dipped them in milk/white/plain chocolate.

  40. Do the cherries need to be very firm for this recipe or will they still be good if they’re starting to soften up a little bit?

  41. My husband just pits the cherries, covers completely with brandy, and puts them in the back of the frig until the holidays. Delicious and not nearly as sweet.

  42. I’m excited to try this but wondering about leaving them on my window sill.
    I’m in Australia, window sill temps get up past 35 degree Celsius.
    Can I store them in a cooler dark place straight away?

  43. I was wondering how long they last once the seal is opened? I’m assuming the “up to one year” comment is for sealed jars? ThanKS,

  44. I would try this ( without the addition of canned cherry juice) but by warming the cognac aren’t you boiling all the alcohol out of it?

  45. Thank you for the recipe, the addition of spices sounds wonderful. Have you ever tried adding cocoa nibs? Just curious. I was wondering if these coukd be done with honey rather than sugar. I appreciate your time, thanks again.