Liqueurs

I find most of the commercial varieties of liqueur too sweet, so by making our own we can control the amount of sugar. As with syrups, we blend the fruit with pectinase then we centrifuge the blended fruit to get a clarified juice (as with the syrups, you can skip this part at home) and add equal parts juice to vodka or ethanol, depending on the ABV I’m looking for. If I want the ABV to be around 40%, I’ll use ethanol. The ethanol I use has an ABV of 79.8%, so once I’ve added it to an equal quantity of blended fruit, the ABV will come down to around 40% (though that’s still high for a liqueur). With vodka, the final ABV will be around 20%. I’ll also add water to bring the ABV down (known as cutting), as you’ll see in some of these recipes.