You can skip ahead to the group and the photos, if you'd like. You'll find code for your ring in HTML format - the only format that Flickr's system will allow - at the bottom of the description on the main page for the group, along with clearly labeled links back to the group homepage, where you are, as you read this, where SSNB can be used. In fact, you'll be finding a lot of clearly marked links back this site, for reasons which should become obvious if you continue reading. Do you want to skip ahead or keep reading? This page is being mirrored on Webring Webspace. If this page loaded slowly, suggesting that Freewebspace.com might be experiencing an unusually heavy server load, and you plan to wander around the homepage for my group, you might want to use that link I just gave you to switch over to the other server. Yes, the two pages link together, you will be able to get back here, and there's a clear path back to the ring.




Quoting the group description: "A group for discussing the making of liqueurs, sharing recipes and tips. Photos including the final product are welcome (as are photos taken at each stage in the process of the creation of a liqueur), the more creatively done the better."



Creative within limits I hate to set, and yet am compelled to. Distillation often is used in serious liqueur making, by licensed professionals, but we are neither licensed nor professional, and those licenses come neither cheaply, nor, I'm told, easily. Distillation of alcohol is a highly regulated and heavily taxed affair in the United States (about 50 percent of the cost of a typical distilled liquor being nothing more than tax at present) and has often been ever since the Washington Administration. That's George Washington, as in "the father of our country", should there be some politician named "Washington" I haven't heard of at the time of this writing (February 6, 2012 at 2:40 pm) who has since become president. I can only imagine the jokes that would follow a candidacy like that one around. This particular sort of law was the cause for the Whiskey Rebellion of 1789, and while I would grant that it is a deeply offensive one, in practical terms, this doesn't matter. Flickr has, most sensibly, established rules against the use of its facilities to discuss the commission of crimes, which is what home distillation generally is, no matter how unjustifiable the law. As a group admin, I must enforce Flickr policy in this, regardless of where my sympathies are to be found.




An entire process removed from consideration, then, by governmental decree.

This leaves us with percolation - the same process you use to make coffee, in the morning, and maceration - the long soaking of an ingredient in alcohol. You're welcome to use the former, if you think it wise and the manager of your building will let you get away with it. Mine would probably come unhinged if she saw me doing that, and really with good reason. Unlike water vapor, alcohol fumes are highly combustible. I'm sure you've heard of still explosions? If one lives in a building with a lot of other people, one endangers not just oneself but others as well, as well as the owner's investment. This becomes everybody's business, and it's a problem that can be easily sidestepped by replacing the percolation with a far less risky procedure, in at least some cases.

Don't think of coffee, think of tea. I've found that much, maybe even most of what is written about the subject of liqueur making online is absolute nonsense, finding some of it to be so the hard way, the first time I made a peppermint liqueur. The recipe called for macerating the leaves, cold and raw, in vodka, straining the leaves after two weeks, and then sweetening what results. This recipe failed in a variety of ways. First, I noticed that after two weeks, one could hardly even smell anything other than the vodka, and, as the author, so wrong about everything else, so rightly noted, in the making of a liqueur, aromas turn into tastes. If you aren't smelling the mint, you aren't going to be tasting it, either. I stored it for a while longer, before something else went wrong. What the author didn't mention, and I soon learned, was that the peppermint leaves would, after a certain point, start soaking up the alcohol like a sponge, and start swelling up, quickly. While I was out of town for the weekend, one of my batches swelled up over the alcohol line. The leaves, unprotected and unpreserved, quickly blackened and rotted. Coming back and looking in the jar, I feared the worst and wasn't wrong. Opening the jar, I was greeted with the aroma of a backed up sewer. All I could do was flush it, with the window open. It was a sad waste of expensive alcohol and good quality peppermint that I could only minimize at that point, because maceration was already underway.

I have two more batches running, at that point. Learning from my mistake, I rejarred the mix as gently as I could, and added more vodka. The other batches came through better, but not well. There was still a mustiness to the product, not unbearable, but not very good. This is how I learned the most important thing about making this liqueur, what the author didn't tell me because, I suspect, he never knew this in the first place. Alcohol needs a long time to penetrate the leaves, and the leaves arrive at the market with molds already growing on them, naturally. Nothing that you would notice at the time of purchase, but let something sit at room temperature for a few weeks, even with immersed in alcohol, and those molds, penetrating the leaves more quickly than the alcohol, will let you know that they were there. As for the mint, I found that the product aged poorly, the aroma of the vodka overwhelming that of the mint in the end. I ended up, toward the end of winter, slowly sipping a vodka spiked sugar syrup, and wondering why I had bothered. The next year, I brought a little more skepticism to what I was reading, along with the faintly bitter memory of that which I hadn't been told, and building on that, along with some very, very basic biology, got far better results.

There aren't a lot of things that really enjoy being boiled, and practically none of them live in your kitchen. What I did, instead of pouring the cold alcohol over the cold mint leaves was to put the leaves in a jar with the sugar, in the usual proportions for making mint tea - curling up my fingers to make the bunch I usually use, I think that's 1/3 of a cup of mint, and 1/3 of a cup of sugar, for 4 cups of tea. I doubled the solids, and instead of using straight vodka, used half vodka and half white brandy. I put the alcohol into a pan, and covered it tightly, so the alcohol wouldn't cook off as I rapidly brought it to a boil. This needs to rapid - brandy, long simmered, tastes like sweat. As soon as I heard - not saw, heard - the alcohol boiling, I took the pan off the stove, plunging the bottom of the pan into an icewater bath, dropping the temperature of the metal of the pan down quickly, without dropping the temperature of the contents very far - in and out in about two seconds, at the most. This was necessary, because if I poured the alcohol out over the hot metal, still warmed by the fire on the stove, the mixture, being over 90 proof, would have ignited, and all I would have had for my trouble would have been flambeed nothing. I poured the alcohol into the jar, which was already resting on a kitchen towel, to protect the counter from damage, and then quickly stoppered it up. Turning the lid using another towel, because I didn't want to get second degree burns, I tightened the band, holding the lid down tightly, ensuring that the highly volatile peppermint oils wouldn't escape.

This is a mason jar we're talking about, and as you might have guessed, this is no apertif. I made a point of leaving air space atop the jar, because otherwise, I'd have been canning the mixture, and I didn't want to deal with that. The jar was scrupulously cleaned, and had itself been sitting in water that hand been brought to a boil, old used mason jar bands sitting on the bottom of the pot, two rows deep, to keep the jars off the bottom of the pan, where the heat from the stove would have been able to crack them. This was done primarily to slowly bring the glass of the jars up to something close to the temperature of the alcohol I'd be putting into them, so that there would be less of a change of the jar cracking or even shattering as the hot liquid went in. This probably sanitized the jars, as they had been at 212 Farenheit for over ten minutes before I took them out, put them on the towels, and started filling them with the sugar, which had been mixed with the peppermint, the two being gently folded together by hand. I had put the lids over the jars, without the bands on, so that any aroma rising from the leaves as they heated would be trapped, briefly, as I went over, grabbed the pot of alcohol, dip the icewater bath dipping thing as described, quickly poured the liquor in - you now see why I initially left the jars unbanded - put the lids back, twisted the bands on, and had everything stoppered up, as I said. While worrying about the thermal stress the sugar was putting on the glass, but there was no helping that, I supposed. The very reason I'd mixed the leaves into the sugar, which provided them with some thermal insulation, ruled out the heating of the sugar in advance - peppermint, on cooking in the open air, loses its aroma and flavor in seconds. The jar had probably been sanitized by the starting procedure, but the thought of botulism frightened me, as it still does. I leave that air space, always.

The key to all of this was preparation in advance, and uncompromising speed. Had somebody knocked on the door during any of this, he or she would have been rudely told to go away and then been ignored, hurt feelings or not. I would carefully, very carefully - the jar will tend to sputter as one does this - take one of the jars filled by the procedure described above, and turn it, slowly, a well folded kitchen towel covering each end of the jar, very slowly because the seal will break a little as one does this, and liquid will start to spurt if one moves too quickly. Slowly rotating the jar, and stopping the moment I started to hear a hiss, restarting more slowly still afterwards, I would invert the tightly stoppered jar, and then slowly right it, carefully, but not as carefully as before. I had no sputtering on the return trip. I would do this to each of the jars, until the sugar had all dissolved, waiting for about ten minutes before repeating this procedure on any give jar. With my boozy, tealess peppermint tea steeping in the jar, I turned out the lights and went to sleep.

The next day, the jars were cool. I washed them to remove any syrupy residue, and then set those aside, letting them age for a few months. What I had, at this point, wasn't exactly the ethanol analog of mint tea, because doubling the amount of solids in the jar - eventually I'd do more than that - meant that the alcohol, which couldn't reach 212 to begin with because of the lower boiling point of alcohol - didn't cook the leaves as thoroughly as they would have been cooked, had I really made tea. But this was enough to kill the mold on the leaves, allowing the leaves to now steep in what was still a highly alcoholic brew for the months that passed, and any new mold that would have to get past that microbe unfriendly medium. No mustiness, no spoilage and very little swelling. The leaves would still float to the top of the jar, but I would open the jar, punch the leaves down with a sanitized utensil, and then, having restoppered the jar, turn the it over, so that the leaves that had been on the bottom were now on the top. If anything was going to be in the air, it was never going to be there for long. Again, all was done gently, even the "punching down" of the leaves, which were pushed down below the liquid, so that as little disintegration as possible would take place. Some would still happen, but there was no need to amplify the problem.

Early next spring, I strained some of the jars, discarding the leaves, and refilling the jars with the slightly murky results, stoppered the jars tightly once more. I let them sit for a few weeks while the very fine residue settled out, quite glad, as I did so, that I had not handled the leaves more roughly than I did, because if I had, I'd have had more residue, more waiting, and less product to show for my efforts in the end. I poured the liqueur off the top into fresh jars, leaving the residue and some of the liquid behind, producing a crystal clear product that taste and smelled strongly of peppermint. No federal laws were broken, no terms of my lease violated, and no serious risks were taken. I had boiled alcohol before, knew what the worst case scenario was because I had seen it while cooking, and knew that no sort of explosion was possible. The alcohol fumes were never concentrated enough for that to be a problem. Still, I had a fire extinguisher on hand, just in case, and the cook's eternal friend - a nice, big box of salt, good for pouring on grease fires, because it smothers the flames instead of spreading them by exploding on contact, as water will. I didn't really picture the fire spreading to the Ratatouille I had just made, or there even being a fire, which there wasn't, but it's always good to be prepared.

That's how you do it, for real. I know this, not because I pulled a recipe out of a cookbook, but because I played around, remembered my disasters and learned from them. This is what I strongly doubt that some of those who publish online have ever really done - put down the time, effort and hard earned money to see what works. Instead, they'll just write something that sounds plausible, and then wait for the inbound links. The gentleman who steered me wrong, himself, was toward the top of the Google search engine results for "liqueur making" at the time, probably, I would guess, because those who linked to him applied the same standard to endorsing his recipes as he had applied in making them - it sounds good. No need to see if it is good, if what you're in this to create is a mass of characters on a screen, to lure in the gullible. But if what you want to create is the real thing, something to be consumed with pleasure, then to approach the making of food and drink as Charles Ives is said to have approached the writing of music - doing so purely in one's head - is a vain enterprise. Great sounding ideas will fail by the thousands. There is no substitute for honest experimentation.






The name of this group is suggestive. I do expect to see sugar or some other sweetener in these recipes, and no recipes for mixed drinks. This is because that's just, simply, what a liqueur is, and if you post recipes for anything else in the discussion section, you are spamming this group. No dry spirits, and no bloody marys or martinis. There are other groups for that, plenty of them, in fact. I will not be patient on this point, and I will not compromise. Nor will I give warnings. I'm a busy man, even when I'm destitute. Actually, especially when I'm destitute. Play with me, and I'll ban you on the spot.

There will be no debating of politics in this group, no, not even the merits of alcohol related legislation, even though I've raised that very issue on this page. If you feel that's unfair, then you're wrong, because there's absolutely nothing to keep you from doing as I've just done, and creating your own page. You can even create your own group. Flickr welcomes people who do that. But this is part of my virtual home, and I make the rules. One of them is that we're going to discuss absolutely nothing on this group, but the making of liqueurs. I'll stretch the definition of "liqueur" far enough to include beverages like creme de cassis, but not much further, and those are the bounds out of which we don't stray. Note the links to the companion groups, one of which is devoted to pairing food with liqueurs. We don't even discuss food, here. Mentioning good places to buy the raw ingredients, talking about the vendors - that's fine, because dealing with the vendors is part of the process of creating the drinks. But if we go wandering off into how evil Obama is, or Bush was, or how videos are going to destroy Flickr any day now, or otherwise act like you didn't even see the name of the group or bother to read the rukes, I'm not going to be amused or gentle.

All photos added to the pool should show a liqueur you've posted the recipe for, either in finished form or at some stage in the process of being made. Feel free, in fact, feel encouraged to take these photos in a creative manner, as long as the attention remains drawn to the drink, and you're not using the drink as an excuse to post pictures of some bikini model to this group. "Because nobody wants to see one of those, right, Joseph?" Maybe somewhere else, I'll respond to that, but not here. Feel free to show multiple shots of the same item, each shot showing it at different stage in its creation. Do not feel free to complain that somebody else has done so, because while this group is a benevolent dictatorship, it is a dictatorship, and I won't be amused if somebody tries to overrule the modstaff. Which consists of me, at the moment, so behave.

Do not be fooled by the use of the word "product". There is to be no selling of anything here, and there couldn't be even if I wanted there to be, because Flickr's community guidelines prohibits this. Except when they don't - long story. If you do try to promote your business through this group, as much as I might miss you, I will have to ban you. Even should the community guidelines be changed, someday, this policy won't, because this is a slippery slope I don't want us to get onto.

All drama is to be taken off of this group, to the designated group created for that purpose, which you'll see listed and linked to in the group description on Flickr. Pursuing somebody into this group to continue drama that took place somewhere else, an act known as "cyberstalking", will not be tolerated. I could list other rules - don't play "lawyer", don't lie about what yourself or others have said, don't play politics in an attempt to create a hostile environment for other members - but I'll say it more simply. Don't be a jerk. Yes, you know what that means. No, I'm not going to argue with you about it. Act like a jerk, and you're gone. Period. Oh - and neither the winning of popularity contests, nor the dictates of any form of Political Correctness, shall be used in the enforcement of this rule. If I have a thousand and one members, some day, and the thousand decide to gang up on the one, who has not earned this, then I will stand with the one against the thousand, less of a success but more of a man for having done so. I like being able to sleep at night, knowing that I've done right by others, even if some of the others should like to pretend that I haven't. How about you?


That's all. Let's continue to the group.