Category: sweeteners
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Distilling Honey Into Vodka: An Interview with Caledonia Spirits Owner/Distiller Ryan Christiansen
Years ago when I first heard of – and tried- Barr Hill Gin, it was a revelation. The gin is neutral spirits with added juniper and honey- that's it. The honey brings with it other aromatics from the flora the bees feed on. The gin is made by Caledonia Spirits in Vermont. A recent press…
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Once Always Almond, Orgeat Has Gone Nutty!
In my new story for SevenFifty Daily, I wrote about how orgeat, the French almond syrup famously in the Mai Tai, is now being made with a range of nuts, seeds, and other ingredients. The story cites examples from around the country and we come up with a new working definition for orgeat. Check it…
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Potential Dangers of Homemade Tonic Water
If you’re making or drinking a lot of homemade tonic water, beware of cinchonism, a condition caused by a buildup of quinine.
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Why Add Sugar to Rum When it’s Made from Sugar in the First Place?
As mentioned in yesterday's post, rum is distilled from any sugar cane derivative like fermented fresh cane juice or molasses. But some producers add sugar to their finished rum after distillation. Adding sugar to any spirit can soften it and hide some flaws, but if you look at the (allegedly) sweetened rums in this post on…
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How Much Sugar is Added to your Rum?
It's a funny thing about rum: It all is distilled from a fermented sugar cane derivative (fresh cane juice, molasses, or something in between), but sugar doesn't pass through the distillation process, so some producers add sugar back into the distilled rum to sweeten it up. Recently on Facebook, people have posted lists of sugar…
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Syrups are the New Bitters on Details.com
Have you looked through your December magazines yet? In just about every one that I get (and I get a lot of them), there is a recommendation for a specialty cocktail syrup of one flavor or another as a suggestion for gifting. By the time I noticed this, I'd already written my latest story for…
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A Sampling of Sugars from Asia
Last year at Tales of the Cocktail I gave a talk along, with David Cid of Bacardi, about sugar, syrups, and rum. A detailed write-up of that talk is on the blog Commercial Free Cocktail. As part of that talk, I passed around a ton of samples of sugars to taste. Most of these sugars…
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When Did Grenadine Become an Artificial Ingredient?
We all know that grenadine is supposed to be a syrup made of pomegranate juice and sugar, often with orange flower water added in. But most commercial grenadines are little more than red food coloring and sweetener. We might think that artificially-flavored cocktail ingredients like grenadine all came to be in the post-war 1940s and…
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The History of Grenadine Use in Cocktails: Literature Review
When was grenadine first used in cocktails? I thought this would be a simple question to answer, but not so much. Along the way to figuring this out, I've had to split up this one blog post into several. First we'll look at the cocktail books from 1862 – 1930 and see where grenadine is…
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Dehydrated Liqueur Flavor Pills and Champagne Cocktails
As an ongoing part of my Solid Liquids Project, I have dehydrated various liqueurs into flavored powders and am now experimenting with new ways to use them. In yesterday's post I described how I bought a pill press to make tablets out of the liqueurs. I started with Angostura bitters, but then made additional "flavor…