In the Solid Liquids Project I found that liqueurs sweetened with honey do not crystallize. (At least the honey-sweetened liqueurs that I tried.) I theorized on why and how we might over come this in this post.
However, in reading an unrelated book, I think I found the real reason these liqueurs are not crystallizing.
Honey is a super-saturated solution, which means it has a tendency to crystallize (come out of solution) and turn solid over time. Because of this, most producers filter and pasteurize their honey to prevent crystallization and create a more uniform product.
Eureka! If it's one thing alcohol producers want, it is products that are consistent and don't spoil or separate in the bottle. My guess is liqueur producers who use honey use pasteurized honey, and that this is why liqueurs sweetened with honey have not crystallized in my experiments.
The Solid Liquids Project is sponsored by Skyy Spirits. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.
During a recent trip to Copenhagen, I stayed an extra day to explore (and revisit) its bars, courtesy of the Danish Cherry Heering liqueur. My job was to run around and drink Cherry Heering cocktails at the best bars in town: tough job!
I began at Ruby, one of the city's most stylish bars. (I previously posted the menu here.) I had two drinks there, mixed up by Nick Hovind. The first was the Harvard Dropout, a spin on the Cherry Harvard that is usually made with cognac.
Harvard Dropout From Ruby in Copenhagen
1 dash Peychaud's Bitters 20 ml Noilly Pratt Vermouth 20 ml Cherry Heering 40 ml Talisker 10-year-old Scotch
Stir, serve up. Garnish with a cherry.
Then I moved on to the next drink:
Cherry in the Rye From Ruby in Copenhagen
40 ml Wild Turkey Rye Whiskey 10 ml Luxardo Maraschino Liqueur 3 Danish Cherries 10 ml Cherry Heering 30 ml Lemon Juice 10 ml Sugar
Shake, serve over ice. Garnish with Danish cherry.
The next bar I visted was Moltkes Speakeasy. I think it is only open on Fridays. The building in which its housed dates back to 1702, but it is now owned by some trade guilds and has a Michelin-starred restaurant in the basement. The back bar is a cabinet built into the wall that may have once held financial books. The space is wonderful, the tiny bar in the front serving two rooms of tables.
They serve classic cocktails; nothing too complicated or modern. That said, I had a modern classic cocktail there - the Copenhagen. The drink was created by Gromit Eduardsen, owner of the bar 1105, for a Cherry Heering cocktail contest in 2009. I visited Gromit's bar last time I was in the city.
Next up at Moltkes, I had my favorite scotch cocktail and one of my favorite classic drinks of all time, the Blood and Sand. It has equal parts scotch, Cherry Heering, sweet vermouth, and orange juice.
Then it was on to my next stop, Restaurant Umami's U-Bar. The bar is chic, but at the time of the night I was there it was rather unpopulated. The bar carries an enviable selection of Japanese whiskies, plus sake, soju, shochu, and other Japanese ingredients.
There, Chris Doig served me a Night Blossom. The drink is usually served with a cherry blossom liqueur, but he substituted Cherry Heering in it, along with shochu, apple juice, and Calpico, a milk-based soft drink.
After that I went over to MASH, or Modern American SteakHouse. The restaurant is part of the same group as Umami. The place has a terrifying rabid cow on the sign- yummy?
The place was jam-packed (it was Friday night, after all) with young professional-sorts out for dinner and drinks in groups after work. The only Cherry Heering drink they had on the menu was the Cherry Alexander, a verion of the famous brandy drink made with Germain-Robin brandy (they specialized in small batch American spirits, especially brandy), Cherry Heering, cherries, chocolate liqueur, cream, and muscat wine.
The drink was tasty, but just because I was drinking a dessert drink doesn't mean I was at the end of my drinking for the night.
My final stop of the night (and I'll note it was only my final stop because I got lost trying to find the next bar after this one) was Union. I love this bar, and you probably will too. It feels like home base. I posted the cocktail menu here.
Almost (but not quite) faster than I could drink them, the cocktails kept coming out, courtesy of Geoffrey Canilao. He made me four drinks:
One with champagne, Creme de Violette, Cherry Heering, and a lemon twist.
A second called the Danish Sour, made with Maker's Mark bourbon, lemon juice, Cherry Heering, and ginger beer.
A third made with rye whiskey, Lillet, Cherry Heering, and orange bitters.
A fourth made with cognac, Cherry Heering, pineapple, egg white, and ginger wine.
After that came my ill-fated attempt to hit 1105 which ended in me wandering the streets of Copenhagen apparently unable to read a map. Eventually I got some sense and hailed a taxi to return to my hotel.
Thanks to Cherry Heering for making the night great.
It's nice when other people do experiments for you. Reader Jonathan Faircloth started a blog called The Zymologic Table to record the trials and tribulations of making orange liqueur dust.
Though it's not my experiment, this is a continuing part of the Solid Liquids project, in which I am searching for ways to dehydrate liqueurs and find creative uses for them. The index page of all the experiments is here.
After a failed attempt at dehydration through standard means, Faircloth picked up some tapioca maltodextrin and used it to dehydrate a liqueur into a sugary form. After a few trials of his own, it worked.
He found that it worked at a 2:7 ratio of liqueur to tapioca maltodextrin. This might be a method to make dusts out of liqueurs and other alcohol to be used for rimming and other purposes when regular heat-based dehydrating doesn't work. (And as an added bonus, supposedly the alcohol is not removed in this method.)
As he was attempting to use an orange liqueur to rim a glass, he was dissappointed to find that when you do this, the orangeyness of orange liqueur goes away. So he added some orange zest into the tapioca malodextrin to get it back.
I have similarly found that the essential oils evaporate (they are very volatile even at room temperature after all) when you dehydrate with heat, and you can put them back with citrus zests. I even temporarily forgot about that and dehydrated nearly a bottle of Cointreau only to be reminded that orange liqueur when the orange goes away just tastes like sugar. Very expensive sugar.
Looks like I'll be adding some orange zest back into the mix as well.
Keep checking Faircloth's site for his further experiments.
The Solid Liquids Project is sponsored by Skyy Spirits. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.
Here are some random pictures and notes from my trip to Rome and the Amalfi Coast with Pallini Limoncello.
Rome is a very, very crowded city, especially around tourist attractions. On our second day there we had a guide who was amazing and knew all the ways around the lines. That's the only way to do it.
I had a gelato at San Crispino, supposedly the best in the world. I can't vouch for that, but my two flavors - whisky and honey- were delicious.
The view from the King Victor Emmanual II memorial is great.
(Look kids, it's the Vatican!)
The Colliseum is a lot bigger than I had imagined. I was thinking it was about three stories tall and could fit a couple thousand people. Nope. It's huge, you can see it from everywhere, and it sat 55,000 people.
(This is the view from my hotel room on the last night, the Hotel Palazzo Manfredi. Wowza.)
(Seating went all the way up to the top. The stage at the end used to cover the whole floor. The stuff below is where the animals and gladiators were kept between fights.)
We went to a bakery called Panella that makes old Roman-style bread once used for travelers. Naturally, they were out of it on the day we went.
Fried artichokes are a thing in Rome. We had them a few times.
The Pantheon is an architectural marvel. This and other ancient temples only survive today because they ripped out all the pagan stuff and replaced it with Christian stuff. Good thing gods are interchangeable.
(At night, outside.)
(Inside, daytime. There is a hole in the roof. This acts as a sundial as well.)
We stopped for an espresso nearby at Eustachio, again supposedly one of Rome's best. Their trick is to use some sort of sugar foam. Maybe they run it through the milk steamer.
Pallini also used to make a fernet!
I bought a Crodino on the Amalfi Coast. It tastes like a non-alcoholic Campari & Soda. Delicious!
I also bought something called China Martini, which I'm guessing is a sweet vermouth derivative using quinine.
And speaking of bitter, while at a restaurant called Sol De Riso, I tasted all the amari on the menu that I previously hadn't tried.
Amaro de Capo - a locally made amaro with notes of quinine, orange, and saffron. Pretty good.
Radis - Tastes like cola, quinine, orange. You could imagine mixing it with soda water to make a cola.
Don Baioro - Very Chrismassy. Tastes of prune/raisin, clove, molasses, and coffee.
Petrus - Perfumy yet incredibly bitter. We took pictures of everyone's expression while tasting it. Here was mine.
I am one lucky son-of-a-gun. This September I visited Rome and the Amalfi Coast with PalliniLimoncello. Though we began the trip in Rome and went to the Amalfi Coast later, I'll explain the process of making limoncello in the proper order.
The Lemons of the Amalfi Coast
The lemons for Pallini are sfusato ("elongated") lemons, so-named for their tapered shape. They are also sometimes called feminine lemons because each side looks like a nipple. These are slightly different from Sorrento lemons that are more football-shaped.
These lemons are low in acid; very sweet. In fact we had an unsweetened lemonade made with them. It was tart, but still drinkable. Even the pith isn't that bitter- we had a 'salad' made with these lemons soaked in balsamic vinegar and salt - and you could eat the whole thing - fruit, pith, and rind.
But for limoncello purposes, they're interested in the skin of the lemons only. The skins of sfusato lemons are highly aromatic and rich in essential oils.
These lemons grow along the Amalfi Coast in a most improbable way. Actually, the whole coast doesn't make much sense - it is all incredibly steep and rocky, with sharp inclines from the mountains down to the ocean. Picture the drive along Highway 1 in California if people had build houses all the way down to the ocean.
Carved into the cliffs are terraced gardens on which they grow lemons, along with eggplants, grapes, tomatoes, olives, and everything else you can think of. It's a surprisingly productive area given that the base is just rocks.
But the cliff-side growing arrangement means lots and lots of sunshine for these plants. The lemons grow so big and so productively that if these were just normal trees growing on their own, the branches would almost surely snap beneath the weight of the fruit.
Thus the farmers have developed a system to support the lemon tree branches, a pergola made of chestnut wood. This forms a lemon tree umbrella of sorts, with hundreds of huge lemons dangling from above.
(Bonus cat picture!)
The terraced lemon groves present some difficulties in harvesting, as you'd imagine. The lemons are all picked by hand as they ripen, then must be carried uphill to the next road that can be pretty far when you've got a heavy crate of lemons on your back.
Processing Lemons
After the lemons are harvested, they're transported by truck along the windy (and terrifying to those of us scared of heights) road to the processing center. We visited the one Pallini uses: CastierAgrumi De Riso.
When the lemons come in to the factory, they are first washed and then sorted. The very best lemons are sold in crates to stores and restaurants. The rest are peeled to make limoncello.
To do this, they use a machine that peels two lemons at a time. It is hand-loaded and seems to frequently jam - no wonder with sticky, oily peels involved. In this video, you can see the machine working.
The peels that come out are then vacuum-sealed into bags and sent to Pallini to use.
Making Limoncello
Pallini's distillery (it's not actually a distillery as they don't distill there but a rectification plant; still I'll call it a distillery for the sake of clarity) is where they make limoncello from the lemon peels.
Though once there were 30 distilleries in Rome, Pallini is the only one left. Originally, the distillery was located a few hundred yards from the Pantheon in central Rome but now it is in an industrial park-type area a good 30-40 minutes drive from the city center.
To make the limoncello, first they soak the peels in high-proof alcohol (I think around 96%) to extract their flavor. Though they didn't tell us the exact time, I inferred the extraction takes less than a couple of days.
Then they blend this concentrated lemon alcohol with more neutral alcohol (that is distilled from Italian sugar beet molasses), water, and a sugar syrup (made from crystallized sugar beet sugar). To make the flavor pop, they also add essential oils from the same lemons.
Somewhere in the process, they homogenize the ingredients so they retain a fresh flavor and do not separate or oxidize. We tasted several other brands of limoncello and most had a slightly musty flavor of oxidation compared to Pallini.
Other Products
Pallini also makes a Raspicello (useful as a Chambord substitute, or perhaps in a Bramble?) and a Peachcello (for the Bellini). These are actually made by distilling the berries and peaches, and adding fruit juice or fresh berries back in at bottling time. The production seemed pretty interesting but we didn't go into it in detail.
Pallini makes around 150 products, which you'd never guess given the size of the distillery. The most famous one, however, is SambucaRomana. They created this brand but sold it to Diageo in the 1980s. They still produce it for Diageo though. It's actually a pretty interesting product on its own; a blend of distillates from three kinds of anise, elderflower, angelica, and other herbs and spices.
Anyway, that's it for my Pallini trip. Limoncello is an incredibly straight-forward liqueur made from very special lemons grown in an absolutely stunning place.
While on a trip with Purity vodka, we were given a talk by MathinLundgren about the Swedish bar scene, specifically in Stockholm. This was great because I had just been to Stockholm two months earlier with Karlsson's vodka and had seen a few of the bars first-hand.
Lundgren says the Swedish bar scene really kicked off about twn years ago, after a few Swedish bartenders moved to london and worked at LAB and other bars, then came home with new skills. More recently, other bartenders have been influenced by working at Milk & Honey and thus Sasha Petraske's influence reaches even to Sweden.
In talking about trends and developments in the Stockholm bar scene, Lundgren identified:
A return to the respect of the career of bartending
Hand-crafted cocktails
Better ice (and the recognition that spirit-forward cocktails with fewer ingredients require better ice)
Knowledge of spirits
Better training (As of 3 years ago they have a government-sponsored, year-long education program somewhere outside of Stockholm.)
Travel - Bartenders are traveling a lot, getting inspired by other scenes, and bringing ideas home. (And as a good example, I've now met Mathin in Sweden, Denmark, and New Orleans within three months.)
The mixologist trend (bartenders with their heads down cranking out only one drink every five minutes while customers wait) is starting to fade
The science/molecular trend came and went
As modern bartenders refocus on both drinks and customer service again, a newfound respect for the older generation of working bartenders
Bars with standards. Previously drink quality depended on who was working at the bar at the moment, whereas now bars are enforcing better training and standards so that every drink tastes good no matter who makes it.
The return of flair, but just little flourishes of it rather than juggling.
Connectedness of bartenders thanks to social media and good bar events.
Other than a government-sponsored bartender training program, he could be talking about New York or San Francisco. It's a small, small world.
Camper English is a cocktails and spirits writer for publications including the SF Chronicle, Details.com, Fine Cooking, CLASS Magazine, and many more. Learn about Camper and Alcademics, or read clips of his published work.
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