I’ve made a few batches of that over the past years; usually a variant of Martha’s recipe that reduces the sugar a bit and splits the liquor 50/50 between inexpensive brandy and un-aged (”white dog”) rye whiskey (George was also a distiller at some point). My grandfather used to make the stuff in New Orleans, too, using local wild cherries (and I suspect, moonshine). He used to age the stuff in an old brewer’s crock about the size of a 5-gallon paint bucket, tucked under the front porch of his house.
Thx for the realtime story.