Region & History

In Nordhausen, the town already demanded a tax on grain spirit in 1507 - the oldest written record of distilled rye in German lands. For centuries, the grain remained the foundation: a purity rule from 1789 required at least two-thirds rye and at most one-third barley. Anyone who followed this was allowed to call their spirit Korn.

From 1919 onward, the German state took control: the spirits monopoly forced distilleries to hand over their alcohol at fixed prices to the Federal Monopoly Administration for Spirits. For nearly a hundred years, this authority decided who could distill and what a liter was worth. For small Korn distilleries, this meant security, but also tight limits.

Right into this order burst a family from Saint Petersburg in 1921. Leo Gorbatschow had run a thriving spirits business there before the October Revolution, until the new Soviet power nationalized the factory. In Berlin-Schöneberg, he rebuilt production following the old recipe and named his company simply after himself.

A second émigré family brought a similar recipe: it matured in Germany from 1929 onward, until the König company in Steinhagen, Westphalia, registered it as the Puschkin brand in 1959. In 1990, the Berentzen Group took over the business. Gorbatschow, meanwhile, had belonged to Söhnlein Rheingold AG since 1960, and thus to the Henkell sparkling wine house. From the 1970s onward, the brand led the German vodka market.

The monopoly ended at the close of 2017. A new alcohol tax law replaced it, and the Federal Monopoly Administration for Spirits was finally dissolved in 2018. By that time, a third name had long since grown in Berlin: Three Sixty, founded in 2004. In 2008, the company joined forces with the traditional distillery Schwarze und Schlichte in Bad Oldesloe, which fully took over the brand in 2011.