I used a wine bottle to do the steeping. Lindz thought that making bitters would be a cool idea, and, by golly she was right. This bottle contains six feet of grapefruit zest (three grapefruits' worth), some grains of paradise, coriander, rosemary, ginger and Everclear.It should be quite a potent cocktail sharpener. I added a bit of sugar syrup after straining it 24 hours later.
There is no end to the permutations of home made bitters.
3 comments:
So it's any combo of citrus, herbs and spices you choose?
The sky's the limit. It's just a tincture of flavors in alcohol. You can take a bottle of decent bourbon and shove a bunch of mint in it, and that ain't too shabby, neither.
Yep, I made some grapefruit bitters a while back, along with coffee bitters and orange bitters. The coriander seems to be sufficient to add "bitter," but there's lots of things that can go in as well like milkweed and dandelion, and some people buy wormwood. But coriander and cardamom did the trick by themselves. My coffee bitters are intensely coffee flavored and almost too bitter. For the coffee and the orange, you add nearly burnt sugar (you melt it in a pan; it'll go orange and then brown, which is when you stop it—if it goes black, it's gone too far). If you don't have everclear, you can use vodka or clear rum—or anything else that seems appealing. I think I'd like to make cherry bitters at some point, but it'll take me about 3 years to go through what I've got now. These make a nice gift for friends, too.
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