When we wrote Country Wines, our first book on homemade spirits, our goal was to share the fun of making them with folks who thought the process was difficult and mysterious. Judging from the response, we succeeded quite well.
But the urge to try something new is ever present in our respective kitchens, and a gift of homemade Irish Cream inspired us to try our hands at making liqueurs. What fun!
Homemade liqueurs have many of the advantages of homemade wines. They can be tailored to your taste, the variations are almost endless, they satisfy your creative urge, they make wonderful gifts, and they are scrumptious additions to a variety of foods.
Liqueurs, or cordials, as they are often called, are easier to make and much less expensive than their commercial counterparts. They also are curiously complementary to the fast-paced society in which we live. Even if you start in December, you can make many of the delicious cordials in this book in time for Christmas. Although cordials do require aging, the time needed to make them mellow and delicious is short. Cordials require no special treatment or unusual equipment, and success is ensured if you follow the recipes.
Since you won’t be distilling the alcohol for your cordials and will have paid the alcohol tax when you bought it, you won’t risk running afoul of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. As long as you don’t sell your creations, you can experiment to your heart’s — and taste buds’ — content.
A few of the recipes in this book are our attempts at recreating the flavors of some well-known cordials. Most, however, are our own creations, refined from numerous experiments following a great deal of research. We hope that you enjoy these recipes as much as we enjoyed developing them, and our friends enjoyed sampling them. We also hope that you’ll experiment with your own recipes, feel free to vary ours, and, most of all, have fun.