By the end of the sixteenth century, the Italians, Germans, and Dutch were busily producing liqueurs. Today their successors follow the same two methods: distillation, with crushed plant matter distilled along with the alcohol (usually a neutral grain spirit); or maceration, which involves soaking the plant matter in a distilled neutral grain spirit to extract the flavors.
If making liqueurs is relatively simple, sorting them out from similar spirits is not.
Blurry are the lines between liqueurs and aperitifs/digestives—which are, in fact, a subset of liqueurs. But why worry? We’ve packed a wealth of these spirits into two chapters (see Aperitifs and Digestives), and taste trumps categorization every time.