Category: liqueur

Solid Liquids: Cane Sugar, Fruit Sugar, and Honey
I hit a snag in the Solid Liquids Project (project index here) as I can get some liqueurs to dehydrate into a powdered sugar, but not others.

In the last two posts, I think I've identified a commonality in the liqueurs that did not crystallize: they are probably sweetened with something other than (or possibly in addition to) cane/beet sugar.

I believe (but am not certain) that X Rated Fusion, Hypnotiq, and Courvoisier Rose are sweetened with fruit juice. Wild Turkey American Honey and Irish Mist are sweetened at least partially with honey. None of these crystallize when heated in the various methods used to make other liqueur powders.

So I decided that I had better learn about these various sweeteners.

Cane Sugar, Fruit Sugar, and Honey vs. Sucrose, Fructose, Glucose

I looked up these different types of sweeteners to see if they could provide insight into why it appears that cane sugar-sweetened liqueurs crystallize while fruit and honey-sweetened liqueurs have not.

Table sugar, which comes from either cane or from sugar beets, is sucrose. Fruit sugar is fructose. Honey gets its sweetness from the fructose and glucose. My first thought was that perhaps sucrose crystallizes readily and fructose does not.

However, sucrose (cane sugar) is also made up of glucose and fructose. And when you heat sucrose, it partially breaks down into glucose and fructose. A syrup of just glucose and fructose is called invert syrup.

Does that mean that there isn't much difference between cane sugar in its hot syrup form and honey or fruit-sugar sugar in its hot syrup form? Or perhaps it is the remaining sucrose in cane sugar syrup that allows for crystallization, while the other syrups have no sucrose so they don't crystallize?

Fructose, or fruit sugar, according to WikiPedia: "Pure, dry fructose is a very sweet, white, odorless, crystalline solid and is the most water-soluble of all the sugars. From plant sources, fructose is found in honey, tree and vine fruits, flowers, berries and most root vegetables… Commercially, fructose is usually derived from sugar cane, sugar beets and corn." Thus, there is definitely a way to get fructose to crystallize- can it be done with conventional oven methods? I need to research this further.

Glucose is sometimes called grape sugar. If what I understand is true, you don't find it just laying around. Wikipedia says, "Glucose is produced commercially via the enzymatic hydrolysis of starch. Many crops can be used as the source of starch. Maize, rice, wheat, cassava, corn husk and sago are all used in various parts of the world. In the United States, cornstarch (from maize) is used almost exclusively. Most commercial glucose occurs as a component of invert sugar, an approximately 1:1 mixture of glucose and fructose." I'm not sure that helps at all.

Crystallizing Honey

Returning to honey, we know it can crystallize as we see it around the neck of the jar. To find out how, I again turn to Wikipedia.

Fresh honey is a supersaturated liquid, containing more sugar than the water can typically dissolve at ambient temperatures. At room temperature, honey is a supercooled liquid, in which the glucose will precipitate into solid granules. This forms a semisolid solution of precipitated sugars in a solution of sugars and other ingredients. Since honey normally exists below its melting point, it is a supercooled liquid. At very low temperatures, honey will not freeze solid. Instead, as the temperatures become colder, the viscosity of honey increases. Like most viscous liquids, the honey will become thick and sluggish with decreasing temperature. While appearing or even feeling solid, it will continue to flow at very slow rates.

When sugar syrup is supersaturated, the crystals soon fall out of sollution. Why should honey act differently?

The melting point of crystallized honey is between 40 and 50 °C (104 and 122 °F), depending on its composition. Below this temperature, honey can be either in a metastable state, meaning that it will not crystallize until a seed crystal is added, or, more often, it is in a "labile" state, being saturated with enough sugars to crystallize spontaneously. The rate of crystallization is affected by the ratio of the main sugars, fructose to glucose, as well as the dextrin content. Temperature also affects the rate of crystallization, which is fastest between 13 and 17 °C (55 and 63 °F). Below 5 °C, the honey will not crystallize.

From this I am guessing that in order to make honey crystallize I can either add some seed crystals to it (table sugar), or try to affect the fructose/glucose balance. Possible ways to do this could be:
- Add table sugar (sucrose), which when heated will break down into sucrose and glucose, or
- Add more glucose, or
- Add more fructose
Since I didn't have any glucose or fructose sitting around, I decided to try adding some table sugar. I did this previously using Wild Turkey American Honey and the oven dehydration technique. It did not work.

This time I decided to try the stovetop crystallization technique, adding extra table sugar to Wild Turkey American Honey. I added some as it was boiling, and then as it hit the candy stage at which a liqueur would normally crystalize, I added more.

I kept adding more and more in the hopes that it would crystallize in some way. Eventually I had probably added more sugar than there was liqueur in the first place but it never precipitated out of solution.

When it hardened it was hard but still sticky; kind of like peanut brittle. This type of dehydrated liqueur won't make a dry sugar when crushed, unfortunately.

So I need to think of some new ideas. Any suggestions?

The Solid Liquids Project index is at this link.
September 6, 2011
Solid Liquids: Dehydrating Liqueurs in the Microwave

In the process of making powdered liqueurs for future use, I've been trying to figure out the best method to get liquids into solids. I'll be comparing the microwave to the oven to the food dehydrator, using Campari as my first liqueur in all of them.

In today's post we'll look at using the microwave. As I learned the hard way, what you don't want to do is stick a liqueur in the microwave and turn it on high. It fizzes, splatters, and burns.

So I attempted to dehydrate liqueur using a low-power setting. In the process I learned something about microwaves, or at least the microwave that I own: Lowering the power doesn't actually lower the strength of the microwave energy, it only changes the length of time it blasts that energy into your food.

So at the lowest power setting (10 on my microwave), it blasts the liqueur with microwave energy for 10 percent of the time, or for 3 or 4 out of every 30 seconds. The rest of the time it's just turning on the plate. The "defrost" setting is level 30, which should tell you how low the setting is.

The One-Shot Method

Because I don't want to stand around the microwave pressing stop and start, I tried to find the setting that would allow me to cook down a liqueur to a solid.

After several tries and lots of hot boiled Campari I determined that I couldn't microwave on any power setting higher than the lowest setting of 10. After just a few seconds the liqueur would start to boil rapidly, then it settles down in the remaining 27 seconds. However, after it cooks down nearer to the end (all the alcohol should be boiled off, but the water is still trapped in the syrup) it seems to boil faster, and overflows and splatters after only the 3-4 second heat interval.

Thus it seems that my microwave is too powerful to effectively reduce the last part of the liquid liqueur to a solid.

The closest I've come (so far) to making this effective is cooking it on the lowest power setting for 60 minutes (which reduces the volume by half, close to the final volume of syrup) then finishing the drying in the oven at 170 degrees Fahrenheit as this is low enough that the syrup doesn't boil over.

However, at least in initial experiments, it takes a very long time to bake off the final water – more than 5 hours. And in this case, I may as well just stick it in the oven at 170 degrees Fahreinheit over night.

The Babysitter Method

As the 'set it and forget it' method of programming the microwave proved ineffective, I thought I'd try the hard way. I put the same 2 ounces of Campari in the microwave and heated it for short bursts until it boiled. Then I'd stop, wait for it to settle, and hit it again. The point was to prevent overboiling and burning.

Don Lee reported success with this method, using short bursts at the beginning and end of cooking, and longer cooking in the middle.

I begun with 20 minutes cooking time on the clock, then kept pausing the heating as the boil became violent. Initially I'd do it standing there babysitting the thing, but then as it was taking forever I'd send emails and such in between heating bursts, allowing it to cool more.

Unfortunately, this method allowed me no long bursts of cooking – it kept boiling over at 10 seconds maximum. More than 85 short bursts over several hours later, it finally chrystalized, though there wasn't all that much of it left.

In conclusion, with my microwave and using Campari anyway, this method is a pain in the butt and not worth the effort compared with setting the oven on a low temperature and letting it cook down overnight.

The Solid Liquids Project index is at this link.

August 24, 2011
Solid Liquids: Dehydrating Liqueurs in the Oven

In the process of making powdered liqueurs for future use, I've been trying to figure out the best method to get liquids into solids. I'll be comparing the microwave to the oven to the food dehydrator, using Campari as my first liqueur in all of them.

In today's post we'll look at using the oven. Following the suggestion of Don Lee on this eGullet thread, I purchased silicone cupcake cups to experiment with. They can be used in the microwave or oven and are easy to clean.

In all of my oven experiments, the procedure was the same. I filled the cupcake cup with 2 ounces of Campari, put it on a cookie sheet, and put it in the oven. Most of the time I cooked the liquid for 12-24 hours.

Dehydrating Campari at 140F and 170F (in separate trials), the liqueur would dehydrate and get clumpy. I'd then squeeze the cupcake cup a bit to break up the clumps and expose any wet spots so that it would dry completely. In the end I had a combination of powder and pebble-sized clumps of dehydrated Campari.

At 200F I had clearly reach some sort of candying state with the sugar. It looked like it was still watery with liquid, but on further inspection it was closer to a melted lollipop- very brilliant liquid sugar. On removal from the oven it formed a hard puck shaped like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.

At 250F the sugar burns a bit, becoming brown in color and smelling more like molasses. It also stays liquid and forms a hard puck in the bottom of the cupcake cup.

On tasting after grinding these with a mortar and pestle, I found that the 250F Campari tasted like brown sugar or molasses with a bitter Campari twinge to it. It wasn't nearly as bad as I expected but I am not sure how I'd use it. Campari gingerbread cookies, perhaps?

(Campari cooked at 200F vs 250F)

The 200F powdered Campari had a distinctly sharp bitterness to it. The 170F Campari powder had the best and most Campari-esque flavor of all, with that great Campari brightness still present and a balance of sweetness from sugar with the heavy bitterness there too. The 140F powder was also very good, but I prefer the 170 at least on this first experiment.

Another reason to use the lower-temperature Campari powder is that the others were harder to crush up (like crushing a lollipop instead of granola). They also seem to want to stick together. After crushing, they get clumpy. (I tried reheating at a lower temperature to see if it would stop clumping, but it just formed back into a blog and I had to re-crush it again!) Clumpy clusters are probably be fine for baking purposes, but not practical for rimming cocktail glasses.

Long story short: Oven at 170F worked best for me.

In the next post, we'll look at using the microwave to dehydrate liqueur.

The Solid Liquids Project index is at this link.

August 18, 2011
Solid Liquids: Dehydrating Liqueurs in a Food Dehydrator

In the process of making powdered liqueurs for future use, I've been trying to figure out the best method to get liquids into solids. I'll be comparing the microwave to the oven to the food dehydrator, using Campari as my first liqueur in all of them.

For now let's talk about the food dehydrator. I have a Nesco food dehydrator, which has a heating element and a fan in the lid. The racks in it are perforated for drying solid material, so I purchased additional solid-bottom racks made for making fruit rolls.

I poured 8 oz of Campari in one rack and turned it on. After 24 hours it was still a bit sticky. Towards 36 hours I noticed some parts that were clumpy so I broke those up to expose still-liquid parts beneath. (It turns out this helps no matter which dehydration method you use.) It might not take 36 hours to dry next time.

You can see it formed some interesting crystal patterns as it dried.

I scraped off the Campari initially with my fingers, then found a flat plastic serving spoon turned upside down made a good scraper.

I then put everything into a mortar and pestle and ground it up.

From 8 ounces of liquid I got about 3 ounces of Campari sugar. (A little less than 50% of the liquid volume has proved consistent using other methods.) That means that Campari has a ton of sugar in it. So much for my all-Campari weight loss program!

The Campari that I couldn't scrape off the plastic sheet washed off surprisingly easily with hot water, so the mess isn't bad.

All told, this method was easy to execute but can take quite a while. The dehydrator doesn't generate a ton of external heat (a concern in the summer when its hot enough already) but enough to be noticeable. Also noticeable is the sound of the fan running.

In the next post, we'll look at using the oven to dehydrate liqueur.

The Solid Liquids Project index is at this link.

August 17, 2011
Solid Liquids: Techniques
The next step in the Solid Liquids project is to look at the various methods people are using to dehydrate liqueurs down to sugars. After searching the interwebz, here are some techniques I found.

I don't think the original DrinkBoy forums are online anymore- at least I can't find them- but that's where this technique first came to my attention several years ago. Bartenders in Australia were dehydrating Campari and other liqueurs and making powders out of them.

Oven Baking

Pour the liqueur on a baking pan, perhaps with a silicone matt on it (for easier removal of solids) and bake at a low temperature overnight. Damon Dyer wrote that his initial method (copied from the Australians) was:

"The process as I learned it was to pour the Campari into a shallow baking sheet, then slowly bake in the oven at low, low, low heat. The Campari eventually loses its water and alcohol, and solidifies. Then it's simply a matter of scraping the solid Campari "brick" off the baking sheet, crushing it into a powder, and enjoying a cocktail.

"However, the revised process that Donbert came up with [see below] is much more efficient."

Microwaving

Way back in 2007, Don Lee took up the issue (in this thread on eGullet), and remembering a tip from the French Laundry Cookbook, he dried out liqueurs in the microwave. He was able to boil Campari down to a sludge in about 4 minutes, then further pulverize this into a poweer.

On refining the technique, his observations were:
- In the initial cooking stage, the alcohol is boiling off so the boiling is quite violent. Use short heating bursts during this stage.
- Also use short bursts of heat at the end, because then the thick sugary liquid can caramelize if you're not careful.
- "For Maraschino (Luxardo) I had to use 20 sec intervals for the first 1.5 minutes, then could let it go for 3 mins straight before going back to 20 sec intervals until 303.5F was reached. The result when cooled is an easily removable "puck" of Maraschino."
- Using this method, Damon Dyer said he had success dehydrating Torani Amer, Yellow Chartreuse, Peychaud's, Herbsaint, Maraschino, and Canton Ginger.
Liquid Nitrogen

Douglas Williams of Liquid Alchemy consulting used liquid nitrogen to make solid Campari. This is really frozen Campari, and thus will melt again. So it's not a useful technique for my purposes.

But in any case, check out this video of it happening:

Williams told me about some other ways to get alcohol into solid form – sometimes without burning off the booze. I am not completely clear on how it works, but apparently you can use tapioca malodextrin and that will bond with anything fatty. This technique can apparently be used to trap booze into a solid form.

I doubt I'll have time to get into the molecular mixology stuff during the duration of this project, but it would be fun to try.

The Solid Liquids Project index is at this link.
August 3, 2011
Solid Liquids: Dehydrated Liqueurs on Cocktail Menus
I've spent some time researching powdered/dehydrated liqueurs online to see where and how they've been used. Turns out: all around the world. Below are the few I found.

It seems that for the most part these dehydrated liqueurs are used as a powdered rims on cocktail glasses, as garnishes sprinkled on top of egg white drinks, and in one case as a popcorn flavoring.
- Araka in Clayton, Missouri uses Campari powder to rim glasses.
- The bar Mea Culpa in Ponsonby, New Zealand, had the following drink on their menu: ANGEL DUST - Cherry & orange macerated Rittenhouse Rye, Liquore Strega, White creme de cacao, Benedictine foam, Campari powder
- This drink from Josh Pape of Chambar Belgian Restaurant in Vancouver, BC contains toasted cashews, gin, pink grapefruit cordial, sherry, apple juice, egg white, and has Campari powder on the rim.
- Eau de Vie in Sydney offered, according to this post, "The Countessa, a reimagined Negroni with Aperol, served up in an exquisite coupe, on the side a half time slice of orange, dusted with Campari powder and caramelized with a blowtorch behind the bar. "
- Val Stefanov of Ontario, Canada used dehydrated Campari to make Campari cotton candy.
- Tom Noviss of Brighton made a Campari powder-rimmed drink with 42BELOW Feijoa vodka, Xante Pear, Avocado, and other ingredients.
- Anvil in Texas used dehydrated Campari and Chartreuse crystals. They also used some on popcorn!
- Callooh Callay in London was using dehydrated Campari in a version of the Negroni.
- Der Raum in Melbourne used it on a tasting menu.
- At Elements in Princeton, New Jersey, they make The Skål! Cocktail with akvavit, Pedro Ximénez sherry, dry vermouth, lemon juice, and lingonberry preserves. Garnished with a rim of dehydrated Chartreuse.
What other drinks have you seen? Any other liqueurs besides Chartreuse and Campari?

For the Solid Liquids Project project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.
August 2, 2011
What’s the Difference Between Orange Curacao and Triple Sec?
There are no legal differences between triple sec and Curacao, only a few practical and many historical differences. In summary:
- Both triple sec and Curacao are orange-flavored liqueurs, and today’s triple secs are typically clear, while curacao is either clear or sold in a variety of colors, including blue.
- Curacao liqueur is not required to come from the island of Curacao nor use Curacao-grown oranges, and according to US law, both triple sec and curacao are simply defined as “orange flavored liqueur/cordial.”
- Some orange liqueurs including Grand Marnier use an aged brandy base, while most use a neutral spirit base.
In short, today there are no hard and fast differences between curacao and triple sec (other than curacao is sometimes colored), and bartenders should use what is best for a particular drink. But the history of how orange liqueur came to be known by these different names is interesting.

From the Caribbean to the Netherlands

"Curacao" liqueur refers to a liqueur with flavoring from oranges that grow on the island of Curacao, off the coast of Venezuela. These oranges are known as bitter oranges or Laraha oranges, with the botanical name Citrus aurantium var. curassuviensis.

These are a variety of sweet Seville oranges that changed in the arid island climate and are reputed to taste awful on their own, but the sun-dried peels of them are prized in making liqueur compared with traditional sweet oranges. Today, bitter oranges are still used in many liqueurs and some gins, though these are most often sourced from other regions including Haiti and Spain.

However the Senior & Co. company, based on Curacao since 1896, still produces curacao (in a variety of colors) made on the island with the island’s oranges. It claims to be the only brand that uses the island’s oranges.

The island of Curacao has been a Dutch island since the 1600s, and was a center of trading and commerce for The Netherlands. The dried peels of the island’s oranges made their way back to Holland where they were infused, distilled, and sweetened. The Dutch Bols company, which dates back to 1575, states that their first liqueurs were cumin, cardamom, and orange, though they don’t specify that the oranges in the first liqueur came from Curacao just yet.

The base spirit for orange liqueurs changed many times over the years. According to Bols historian Ton Vermeulen, the earliest records of distillation in the Netherlands dating to the 1300s detail distilling grapes. The northerly climate isn’t conducive to grape-growing however, and by the end of the 16th century many distillers used distilled molasses (sugar from colonies was often refined back in the home countries, with distillable molasses as a secondary product). In the 1700s the Bols company has records of both grain alcohol and the molasses-based “sugar brandy” being used as base spirits. Grape brandy was seen as more refined, and according to Vermeulen, the “owner of Bols around 1820 would prefer to use [grape] brandy and if it was too expensive would use grain alcohol instead.”

Column distillation that spread after 1830 allowed for any fermentable matter to be distilled to near neutrality and make a suitable base for liqueurs. The Netherlands and most of Europe switched to using neutral sugar beet-based spirit in the second half of the 19th century, after Napoleon heavily promoted the sugar beet industry in France. Today neutral sugar beet spirit is the base of Cointreau.

France and Triple Sec

The most famous and well-respected orange liqueurs on the market today, Grand Marnier and Cointreau, don’t come from Curacao or from the Netherlands, but from France, and it seems to be in France where Curacao liqueur evolved into triple sec liqueur.

Cointreau initially produced a product called “curacao,” and then a “curacao triple sec” and then a “triple sec." According to Alfred Cointreau, the product labelling (and it seems the sweetness levels and possibly accent flavors) evolved over the years:

1859
- Curacao
- Curacao ordinaire
- Curacao Fin
- Curacao sur fin
1869
- Curacao Triple-Sec
1885
- Triple-Sec
Cointreau cites 1875 as the creation date of its orange liqueur, which is made with both bitter and sweet orange peels. Grand Marnier cites 1880 for its blend of cognac and orange peels. Both of these brands now shy away from the words “Curacao” and “triple sec,” on their labels.

The brand Combier claims 1835 as its creation date, with “sun-dried orange peels from the West Indies, local spices from the south of France, alcohol from France’s northwest, and secret ingredients from the Loire Valley – a formula that became the world’s first triple sec: Combier Liqueur d’Orange.”

But to what are the “triple” and “sec” referring?” The “sec” is French for “dry,” and the “triple” could point to several things.

Alexandre Gabriel, president of Cognac Ferrand, says that in conjunction with cocktail historian David Wondrich, they researched the history of triple sec and curacao and found a listing from a 1768 Dutch-French dictionary that described an infusion (without redistillation) of Curacao oranges in probably-grain spirit, but by 1808 recipes appear for redistillation of the oranges in spirit.

Gabriel’s theory is that the triple refers to three separate distillations or macerations with oranges. His Dry Curacao product is described as, “a traditional French ‘triple sec’ – three separate distillations of spices and the ‘sec’ or bitter, peels of Curacao oranges blended with brandy and Ferrand Cognac.”

By Gabriel’s definition, the ‘sec’ refers to the drier-tasting (due to bitterness) oranges from Curacao, independent of the sugar content of the liqueur. A contrary opinion comes from Andrew Willett of the blog Elemental Mixology, who makes a convincing argument that the ‘triple sec’ is a level of dryness from sugar on a scale from extra-sec, triple-sec, sec, and doux (‘sweet’).

Willett also proposes that the ‘triple’ could indicate three types of oranges: many French brands call for both bitter and sweet oranges in the recipe, plus some add an orange hydrosol (water-based orange distillate). That an early product from Grand Marnier was called Curacao Marnier Triple Orange could help support this argument. Willett concludes in another post that a “Curacao triple sec” is “Curaçao liqueur that is both triple-orange and sec.”

So “Curacao triple-sec” may refer to three distillates that include Curacao oranges, three types of oranges including Curacao in a very dry liqueur, or just a specific level of dryness from sugar of a Curacao liqueur. As mentioned, these differences and definitions are not meaningful today.

Curacao comes in many colors, but coloring of the liqueur is more traditional than one might imagine. It dates back at least to the early 1900s (when the liqueur was colored with barks) and some cocktail books including the Café Royal Cocktail Book from 1937 specify using brown, white, blue, red, and even green Curacao in various recipes.

Today, bartenders might consider each part of the liqueur in deciding which brand is appropriate for a particular cocktail: the orange flavor, the base spirit, the proof of the liqueur, and yes, the color. There’s a whole rainbow to choose from when choosing an orange liqueur.

Below Here is the Original Post that I updated with the above information. Please ignore it! It's just here for legacy purposes.

I tried to answer that question as best as I could in my recent post for FineCooking.com.

Four hundred years ago, the Dutch were some of the world’s greatest traders and, not coincidentally, great distillers. They’d preserve the spices, herbs, and fruit brought home on ships in flavored liqueurs and other spirits. Curacao was one of those liqueurs, flavored with bitter orange peels from the island of the same name. At the time, the liqueur would have had a heavy, pot-distilled brandy as its base.

Then the French came along (a couple hundred years later) and invented triple sec. The “sec” meaning “dry,” or less sweetened than the Dutch liqueur. The origin of the “triple” is still up for debate, but the two leading schools of thought are “triple distillation” versus “three times as orangey”. Triple sec was also clear, whereas curacaos were dark in color.

Today, triple secs are usually still clear (made from a base of neutral spirits), whereas curacaos may start that way and be colored orange, blue, and even red. Cointreau is probably the most recognized brand of orange liqueur in the triple sec style, and Grand Marnier, despite being French, is more in line with the Dutch curacao style as it has an aged brandy base.

Nerds: Do you think that's an accurate summation?

The full post is here, and it includes a recipe for the White Lady cocktail.
February 21, 2011
Chartreuse Secrets

Some friends who meditate told me about the movie Into Great Silence, which follows the Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse in the French Alps. As I barely stop talking you can bet they weren't telling me about its depiction of the silent lifestyle of the monks as something of interest, but because there is footage of them making the famous liqueur Chartreuse.

So I rented the movie and the bonus disc on Netflix. I fell asleep watching the main disc (twice!) and didn't see anything about the liqueur. But on the bonus disc, which you can rent separately and skip all the chanting, there is about ten minutes focusing on making Chartreuse.

In it, a monk goes about weighing dried herbs. You can see about four of them but I couldn't identify them. It was a combination of dried leaves, flowers, some seed stuff, and some roots. If I had the time I'd do screen caps and we'd play "guess the herb."

The monk then grinds them together and places them into a sack. He then hands them off to the distillery where other people distil them. I'm assuming much of the secret of Chartreuse comes from this combination of herbs, roots, bark, etc. that is delivered to the distillers already ground up so they can't guess what the components are.

The monk interviewed in the story says there are 130 plants used to make Chartreuse but, "There is no need to seek to know more," about the production, because they aren't telling.

However, the film then goes on to reveal more: The ground plants are infused in alcohol, water is added, then this is distilled. The distillate, which would be clear at that point, then undergoes seven or eight macerations with more plants that give it its characteristic color.

I believe they said it takes a month to make a batch of Chartreuse. No wonder the stuff is expensive.

The liquid is then sent to the cellar, where it ages first in large vats, then in smaller ones. The liquids are then reblended and sold.

I know of a few people who have visited the Chartreuse facility but apparently you don't get to see the monks; just the aging vats. I'm not sure what else, but I do still want to go in person one day. This film was a little peek behind the curtain to see what happens before it goes into the barrel.

February 16, 2011
Chartreuse + Chocolate = Delicious

The week before Paul Clarke wrote about the same topic to make it look like I ripped him off, I wrote my next blog entry for FineCooking.com, about the magical mystery combination of Chartreuse liqueur and chocolate.

While Paul was creative and found four drinks that combine the two ingredients, I went to Jamie Boudreau and asked if I could borrow a single recipe he blogged about in 2007. I'd like to think that this just makes me efficient.

(Verte Chaud by Jamie Bodreau. Photo also by Jamie Boudreau.)

Read the story on FineCooking.com here.

And remember, your comments at Fine Cooking make me love you more.

December 6, 2010
Welcome Back, Harvey Wallbanger

With the new formula of Galliano and a renewed interest in the fern bar, the Harvey Wallbanger is about due for a comeback.

In my latest post for Fine Cooking, I investigate the cocktail. Have a look, and remember that comments make me happy and keep me employed.

October 25, 2010