Botanicals

What could be better than giving your drink or cocktail a personal touch with your own spice selection? Besides our standard selection—allspice, cinnamon, and green cardamom—we offer a wide variety of spices that can create a unique and unexpected result. Spices like tena'adam (passion fruit pepper) or siltimur (cedar), as well as bucay, the champion of black peppers for smokiness. Delicious in gin, just like our two cubebs.

Try some rosemary, juniper berries of course, or some mbongo seeds instead of a blade of lemongrass, either alone or as a group!

Keep in mind that dried spices aren't rehydrated overnight. The best way to use your botanicals is to give them time to release their flavor by creating an extract. Use the drink you want to spice up or a drink that's flavored with it. combines or make a syrup. Larger fruits or fruit pods juniper or cardamom are best first bruise.

Gin for example

Try making an extract of finely ground mbongo with some peel of a good organic Amalfi lemon in gin And make your own alternative lemongrass gin and tonic. Feel free to serve it with a fragrant green sprig of fresh lemongrass—from your own herb garden?—to stimulate the taste buds.

Three more infusions using gin as an example:

  • bucay pepper (smoke) with two Nepalese berries: siltimur (cedar-citrus) and raye timur (wood-grapefruit) in gin, with some fresh blueberry (Boreal cedar gin)
  • red sansho pepper, green cardamom, cinnamon buds, juniper berries, a touch of yuzu juice and a leaf of sansho cress in gin (Roku gin)
  • cubeb pepper, juniper berry and also this time mbongo, the lemongrass pepper, or lemongrass (Bobby gin)

Whiskey

Give a twist to your Old fashioned whiskey by not using date syrup but making a syrup from a Flavorful sugar (demarara or muscovado) with Ceylon cinnamon and cinnamon sticks. This syrup is also delicious in your Moroccan carrot salad (made with carrots, raisins, ginger, saffron, a little garlic, honey with cinnamon or date syrup with cinnamon or this cinnamon syrup).

Another infusion, for Sour whiskey this time: cinnamon buds with a hint of maple syrup in whiskey.

Vodka

A citrus note is very nice in your vodka. Try a citrus pepper like rayon. timur, ma khaen, andaliman or sansho. Plenty of choice.

Some Tasmanian peppers in your Vodka is magic. The berries impart a wonderful flavor and a captivating color. A variation on this is an infusion with red vodka, not just for the color.

Join there Add some finely chopped celery to create a delicious extract for your Bloody Mary. Ground red vodka with or without celery in vodka (Pepper vodka or Bloody Mary)

By the way, you can also make Pepper vodka with a popping black pepper, such as Tellicherry or Wayanad

White wine

White wine: sangia! Add a dash of Peruvian ginger syrup (so delicious!) with cardamom. Always use a flavorful sugar, not granulated or brown sugar, but demerara or muscovada. If you make an infusion of ginger and cardamom in white wine (without the sugar), you can create your own version of a martini on the rocks in no time.

A herbal extract as a drink

In the beverage industry, sonication is often used to eliminate the time-consuming infusion process to be drastically shortened. Indeed with sound.A sonicator or ultrasonicator exerts so much pressure on the botanical that the cell wall is broken open and the cell contents are immediately released. Sonication is essential for releasing the aromatic compounds of very hard ingredients such as wood chips for Whisky, bourbon, or brandy. It takes years in barrels for these to be released, and to a lesser extent, the hard and dense structures as well. of tree bark and evergreen leaves.

Soft and delicate ingredients such as rose buds and saffron, give their aromatic content Easily free, not only the desired notes, but also the less desirable ones, and the trick is to eliminate the latter. So much for that.

It is certainly not easy to find the right balance between the components of an extract, also Because the quality of the basic ingredients can vary from batch to batch, time and temperature can play a significant role. You must be able to control it. Our advice: Therefore, start with a recipe that isn't too complex, perhaps even making a solution with just one ingredient. For example, one pepper. And only when you're satisfied, add a second ingredient, preferably a volatile one like citrus peel, as this will yield results quite quickly.

It could very well be that If you like your extract so much that you'd like to drink it, go ahead and do it :-)