Botanicals

What could be better than giving your drink or cocktail a personal touch with your selection of spices? In addition to the standard choices – allspice, cinnamon, and green cardamom – we offer a variety of spices that can create a unique and unexpected result. Such as the tena'adam (passion fruit pepper) or the siltimur (cedar), but also the bucay, the champion among black peppers. peppers as far as smokiness is concerned. Delicious in gin, just like both our Cubebs.

Try some rosemary, juniper of course, or some mbongo seeds instead of a sprig of lemongrass, alone or all three!

Keep in mind that dried spices are not instantly rehydrated. The best way to use your botanicals is to give them time to release their flavor by making an extract. To do this, use the drink you want to flavor or a drink that can be used with it. combines or make a syrup. Larger fruits or fruit pods as juniper or cardamom, it is best bruise first.

Gin, for example

Try making an extract of finely ground mbongo with some zest from a good organic Amalfi lemon in gin. and make your 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 with gin as an example:

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

Whiskey

Give your a twist Old fashioned whiskey by not using date syrup in it, but making a syrup from a Flavorful sugar (demarara or muscovado) with Ceylon cinnamon and cinnamon buds. Such a syrup is also delicious in your Moroccan carrot salad (made from carrots, raisins, ginger, saffron, some 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 accent in your vodka is delicious. Try a citrus pepper like raye. timur, ma khaen, andaliman or sansho. Plenty of choice.

Some Tasmanian peppers in your Vodka is magic. The berries impart an amazing flavor and an enchanting color. A variation on this is an infusion with red Voatsiperifery, not only for the color.

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

By the way, Pepper vodka can also be made excellently with a spicy black pepper, such as Tellicherry or Wayanad.

White wine

White wine: sangia! Add a splash of a syrup made from Peruvian ginger (so delicious!) with cardamom. Always use a tasty sugar; not granulated or brown sugar, but demarara or muscovada. If you make an infusion of the ginger and cardamom in white wine—without the sugar—you 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 the time-consuming to drastically shorten the infusion process. 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 components of very hard ingredients such as wood chips for whisky, bourbon, or brandy. In barrels, it takes years for them to develop, and to a lesser extent, the same applies to the hard and dense structures. of tree bark and evergreen leaves.

Soft and delicate ingredients such as rosebuds and saffron, yield their aromatic content easily free, not only the desired tones, but also the less desired ones, and the art is to eliminate the latter. So far.

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 an important role. You must be able to control. Our advice The solution is therefore: start with a recipe that is not too complex, perhaps even by making a solution with just one ingredient. For example, one pepper. And only add a second ingredient when you are satisfied, preferably a volatile one like citrus peel, because it yields results quite quickly.

It could very well be that You like your extract so much that you would want to drink it right away. Then do so :-)