All for these.
What, you may legitimately ask, are these infernal contraptions? Eyes in glasses? Toenails? Have I taken up some dark magics?!
My answer to all that is: I bet that would be easier.
Frankly, I blame Amazon. They had this huge digital sale, tons of books under four dollars. And one of the 99 cent ones was 'Make Liqueurs as Gifts!' and I was like 'Hey, I'm not really drinking anymore but totally have this booze left over, I bet it'd be swell to have homemade gifts of teh alcohols to give away!' It helped that I had recently been wanting to paint glass jars for no apparent reason. I had thought to make candle holders but this seemed so much cooler.
I'm going to share a secret with you, kittens. It takes a FHTAGN TON of alcohol to make liqueurs. Mostly vodka. I think I went through a 1 1/3 liter. I also polished off a bottle of gin.
If I had been smart and really thought this out, what I would have done was pick a relatively easy recipe, and tried it. If it worked out, I would have branched out, tinkering as I went.
I am neither smart, nor good at thinking things out.
What I did instead was by about six different kinds of fruits, nuts, spices, extracts...plus jars, a strainer, and coffee filters.
Those bottles are the main bunch, but there are another three in a closet, because they need to be kept in a warm dark place. So there's close to a dozen of these suckers. And, continuing my trend of idiocy, I decided to experiment straight off. I tried to keep detailed measurements and whatnot but there's a disturbing amount of 'approximately's written in my journal. I also got a giant At-A-Glance calendar to let me know when to shake this bottle, turn that bottle, strain this, etc.
What I should have done when I realized I was going to burn through alcohol like a fratboy was taper down all of the recipes. So what if I would have leftover fruit (which I do anyway)? Good snacks, way to be healthy. And truthfully, I did start really paring it down as we went, but it was still a lot.
So if this fails, it's going to fail epically.
But if it works...
...this could be the beginning of the Opheliac line. I've already started naming them. The above bottle will eventually be Incarnadine. I'm also designing labels, but these will be relatively simple and of course dependent on them not totally sucking. The above bottle again, has to sit without being moved for three months. My raspberry ones for pretty much the same amount.
So...I will keep you in the loop on that. Honestly, it was really fun, just stressful because I realized after it was too late to really stop that it probably could have been handled better.
Oh, and sugar syrup sucks to make. Just throwing that out there.
I had thought about making a whole new blog just to focus on different summer projects (art, writing, this, etc), but since I haven't done anything on this blog for awhile, and it would just get shut down once I start working again, I figured this was best.
Hit me up with your thoughts.
No comments:
Post a Comment