Projects: Home made alcohols

Last year I bought some strawberries that weren't very nice.   Rather than eating them anyway I decided to turn them into strawberry vodka!   I sliced them up small, put them in a glass bottle and added enough vodka to cover them.   I left them in the vodka for a week so, slowly adding sugar to taste, and shaking.

After a week the vodka tasted really strawberryey, so I strained the vodka with muslin (tried coffee strainers first, didn't work) and voila!   Pretty red vodka that tasted like strawberry jam!   Brilliant!   And I had lots of decoloured vodka soaked strawberries at the end.   Well I had to eat them, right?   That was a merry evening.   The vodka isn't very strong, being half fruit juice and sugar now, so you can drink it neat.   It seems to keep very well too.  


  

Well, I wasn't going to stop there now, was I?   So far I have tried raspberry, blueberry, peach and plum.   The raspberry took a little longer to taste good.   Almost two weeks.   But I think it's the best I've done so far.   Tastes so good.   I've also found it's best not to leave it longer than it needs.   If you take the fruit out sooner it tastes fresher and fruitier.   If you leave it for longer it seems to go more syrupy and less natural tasting.   Blueberry took even longer to be done, about three weeks, and it wasn't quite as good.   It tasted nice, but on a blind taste test you probably wouldn't guess blueberry.   Same with the plum.   Nice, but not particularly plummy.   The peach I'm not so happy with.   It was nice for a little while, but didn't keep as well as the others.   Perhaps it's because peaches have a higher water content or something.   Who knows.

 raspberry

 blueberry

       Plum and peach

So next I decided to branch out from vodka and make sloe gin!   A friend's mum gt me the sloe berries.   It worked really well, though I think I added a bit too much sugar.   Ah well.   

And there's been one other thing I've tried so far that's a little different.  Coffee liqueur!   I forgot to get a picture of it, but it was brilliant.   This one has an actual recipe, which I got from a friend (but only followed approximately).   3/8 L cream (186ml), 10g vanilla, 1/8 L (62ml) coffee, 1/8 L milk, 100g sugar, 1/8 L dark rum, 1/8 L 96% alcohol.   It lasted really well and was very delicious.   I know that 96% alcohol is hard to come by in this silly country (I brought mine back from Italy) and I don't think it adds much to the flavour.   It would probably be nicer with just rum, but I'm not sure how well the cream would keep then.  I'll have to experiment.