Tag: liqueur

Solid Liquids: Dehydrating Other Liqueurs: Problems

So far in the Solid Liquids Project (project index here) I've been experimenting with the best way to get liqueurs into a solid/powder/sugar form.

I have performed all of these experiments with Campari so far, but now it's time to try some other liqueurs. Since Skyy Spirits is sponsoring this project, I began with other liqueurs from the company.

I put four liqueurs into the food dehydrator: X-Rated Fusion Liqueur, Wild Turkey American Honey, Irish Mist, and Midori.

After a standard amount of time (24-36 hours), only Midori had crystallized.

Second Attempt: A Long Time in the Dehydrator

The others remained partially liquid, like a thick syrup.

So I put them back in the dehydrator for another two days. They never crystallized, but when I let the trays cool, most of the liqueur did turn solid, forming almost a plane of glass that easily cracked.

I broke this up, but these liqueurs were still very, very sticky and would not be useful for rimming glassware and other solid uses.

Third Attempt: Using the Oven

Next I tried to use the oven to see if the temperature was the problem; perhaps these liqueurs needed higher temperatures to crystallize? I took the sticky solid liqueurs from the dehydrator and put them in the oven at 170. The result was just a sticky puck of gooey liqueur. Still not crystallized.

Then I repeated the oven attempt, this time using liquid liqueur (last time I took it from the dehydrator after that didn't work) but set at the lowest temperature, 140 Fahrenheit. This also did not achieve crystallization.

Fourth Attempt: Adding More Sugar to the Liqueur

What if, I thought, the problem is that there isn't enough sugar in the liqueur to crystallize? To test this theory (assuming it would fail, because as the liqueur dehydrates the water and alcohol disappear, making a concentrated sugar solution so it shouldn't matter how much sugar is in there as long as there is some) I added sugar to Wild Turkey American Honey.

This liqueur wouldn't actually hold much additional sugar. I added one part sugar to two parts Wild Turkey American Honey and it would not fully dissolve into solution.

So I gave it a hard shake and put it in a cupcake cup and put it in the oven at 170F. After a day it mostly crystallized, but still left a slightly sticky puck of non-solid liqueur at the bottom.

When I ground up this sugar in a spice grinder, it became a powder, but the powder was incredibly sticky. You couldn't use it to rim a glass or anything like that. In the storage container I put it in, it quickly formed a solid gooey mass.

I was slightly despondent: Only two out of five liqueurs that I tried to dehydrate were successful.Would these methods only work on a fraction of liqueurs?

But then inspiration hit….

To keep this post from being too long, I'll post the second half of it tomorrow.

The Solid Liquids Project index is at this link.

September 29, 2011
Dehydrating Liqueurs: Stovetop Crystallization Method

So far in the Solid Liquids project, I experimented with using the food dehydrator, oven, and microwave to dehydrate liqueurs into flavored sugars. The project index is here.

Well, thanks to a Facebook friend, I now have a much more efficient way than all the others I've tried. Lauren Mote, co-owner of Kale & Nori Culinary Arts, wrote me to tell me the way she's made liqueur sugars. She wrote:

So I have found the easiest way to do this is actually culinary and through "almost" candy making.

If you cook down the spirit, and remove the water molecules, the liquids eventually crystallize…. the trick is "agitation". When you're trying NOT to crystallize, which is making candy, brushing the edges of a pot with water constantly prevents crystals from forming in the sugar. However, when you agitate the liquid and sugar, the crystals form. Continue to agitate, on low heat past the candy making stage, do not burn it. You will concentrate all of the flavour, without a microwave. Once the crystallization starts, it's really really really fast! Remove from the heat, keep mixing until the mixture turns light and powdery. Let cool on a SilPat non-stick baking sheet. Once cool, blitz in a food processor and sift through a tea strainer. What you're left with is completely concentrated, amazing powdered spirit. I did this with Cointreau and it was really amazing.

I wasn't sure I was doing it right but I tried it out with Campari, and it works! In short, add the liqueur to a metal pot,

Heat it so that the alcohol burns off, then it starts going into the candy phases as the water burns off.

First it boils, then it gets thicker, then it starts to froth. Eventually the frothiness gets really big, like it's going to overboil.

Stir it with a metal spoon (perhaps you have a barspoon around). Not long after this point the frothiness dies down a little. You'll notice sugar crystals on the bottom of the pan as you stir it and the volume of the liquid seems to shrink a lot. Though it still looks quite liquid, it's ready.

Pull it out and as fast as you can, scrape it onto a silicone Silpat or other non-stick pan. You'll see that it is sugary and full of crystals. This dries really quickly.

Then you can stick it into a spice grinder and get your powdered liqueur.

The process takes less than two hours, and it seems to work with larger quantities of liqueur just as fast. Sweet.

In future posts, we'll finally start dehydrating liqueurs other than Campari.

The Solid Liquids Project index is at this link.

September 15, 2011
Solid Liquids: Campari Syrup

In the last post in the Solid Liquids project, I used dehydrated Campari to make a non-alcoholic Campari & Soda.

Then it occurred to me that for that purpose there was no need to dehydrate the liqueur completely. I could just burn off the alcohol and have a non-alcoholic syrup.

So that's what I did. I filled a pot with Campari and took its temperature with a candy thermometer when heating it. Alcohol boils at 172F as opposed to 212F for water, so I tried to keep the temperature between the two.

It started to bubble around 175 and I could smell alcohol vapor. It began boiling around 183F. When it got to 189F it began to look thicker, as plenty had boiled off.

After an hour total I cooled the liquid to check the volume and found it to be reduced by 50 percent. And since the alcohol content of Campari is 24 percent alcohol hopefully all the booze and some of the water burned off as well.

After cooling and storing it, I made another non-alcoholic Campari & Soda. I added about an ounce of Campari syrup to about 3 ounces of soda water.

It's good, probably better than the powdered liqueur version. But campared with regular Campari & soda, real Campari still tastes better. Again the real deal has more of an orangey flavor, so the non-alcoholic version can use an expressed orange peel added to it.

I'm guessing that the volatile citrus orange (oil?) in Campari burns off in the cooking and that's why it's not present in the syrup/solid version.

So: What else should I use this Campari syrup for?

Update: I just remembered that I saw Campari syrup on the menu at Nightjar in London. I'm not sure if their syrup is the same thing or something else, but it's in two drinks from the summer menu (forgive the funky formatting, it's their font):

bRick lane cocktail
g’vine floRaison gin
campaRi syRup
dolin dRy veRmouth
fResh squeeZed mandaRin
chambeRyZette jelly

baRnaRd’s bRew
nut-infused chaiRman’s ReseRve Rum
nightjaR faleRnum
caRibbean bitteRs
campaRi syRup
fResh squeeZed lime

The Solid Liquids Project index is at this link.

September 8, 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
How NOT to Dehydrate Campari

I figure, why not try the method that looks easiest first, even if it seems doomed to fail?

That's what I decided to do as an experiment in dehydrating liqueurs down to sugar: to see what happens when you cook Campari the fastest way possible to get all the liquid out.

I put two ounces of Campari in a silicone cupcake cup and tossed it in the microwave. After 30 seconds it boiled over. First it came to a rapid boil, then turned to a real frothy boil.

After the liquid evaporated more, the boil turned more gentle; around three and a half minutes in. But soon enough, at four minutes, came the smell of caramelizing/burning sugar.

At five minutes most of the liquid was gone, and then the sugar started blackening. The Campari turned black, puffed up, and started smoking. I had to open all the windows in my apartment to keep the fire alarm from going off.

A black crust formed where the red sugar was. After removing it from the microwave, it cooled quickly then I tried it. Surprisingly, it tastes just like a burnt marshmallow; just a little more molasses-y. There was no Campari taste to it at all.

In conclusion: That Didn't Work.

The Solid Liquids Project index is at this link.

August 11, 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 is Fernet?

By far the most famous type of fernet is Fernet-Branca, but there are other fernets on the market. So what is fernet, generally speaking?

(Thanks to commenter Scott who wrote in on the "Shhh It's a Secret" seminar at Tales of the Cocktail write-up for asking the question that I never thought to ask.)

I asked John Troia, co-founder of Tempus Fugit Spirits. They have a fernet coming out, Angelico Fernet. Here's what he says.

I’m sure there may be varying degrees of opinion, but we feel that the following is reasonably consistent with our research and that of others:

Although categorized under Italian Amari (Bitters), Fernet is its own bitter category and is most often listed underElixir/Elisir in Italian liquor manuals, when not simply called ‘Fernet’.The extremely bitter (amarissimo is an apt description) concoction has its origins most often attributed to Bernadino Branca, who commercialized it in 1845, but conflicting data conjectures its creator(s)as : a mythical doctor/collaborator of Branca from Sweden named Fernet (possibly as an off-shoot of the older and better tasting ‘Swedish Bitters’); Maria Scalia, the wife of Bernadino Branca who was a master herbalist and self-taught doctor; a monk named Frate Angelico Fernet who may have been responsible as the origin of many herbaltonics and elixirs (Fernet being a historical French Burgundy surname – pronounced Fair-Nay- and which underwent many spelling transformations); and a modern Italian liquorist text-book reference to it having originated somewhere in Hungary.

Fernet was most likely created to counteract the effects of Cholera and Malaria, but went on to be used for everything from a laxative to hangover cure. Today, as in the past, there are many Fernet producers (with the largest making so much of the world’s production that some actually believe Fernet is a brand-name), but mostly made in tiny quantities for local rural Italian consumption. The various known recipes most typically share ingredients such as Aloe, Saffron, Quinquina, Gentian, Anise, Angelica, Mint and the odd Larch/White Agaric, a type of tree-bark loving mushroom (once also known as Spunk) rarely used or even found commercially outside of Italy. This latter ingredient (along with Saffron) seems to define and create the backbone of the best Fernets; Agarico mondo has an odd, bitter taste that becomes lightly mentholated on the mid-palate and was used to treat night-sweats.

According to Abruzzo’s local doctor, pharmacist, wine-maker, distiller and bitter-maker Marchese Dottore Egidio Niccolo Antonio d'Alesasndro di Trasmondi, the best Fernets have little or no sugar in them as it impairs digestion.

Thanks John – any questions?

July 29, 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