COLD INFUSE HOW TO
COLD INFUSE FREE

That will give you more flexibility in how much flavor you want to infuse (more on that later.) Also consider roasting your spices to bring out the flavor and aromatics further. If the spice is available whole (cinnamon sticks, whole cloves, star anise, etc.) then consider buying it whole instead of ground.

Spices: Again, fresh spices (vs three-years-old and from the back of your spice cabinet) are always going to give you a better flavor.

If possible use dried fruit (dried apricots, berries, etc.) as that will be more effective.

Fruit: due to its high water content, fresh fruit doesn’t always infuse very well.

Teas and Dried Herbs: As fresh as possible is always best, but these tend to.

For most spirits I usually aim for a price point around $15-20 (in my local market in Southern California).Īs for the flavoring ingredient, here are a few tips: You simply won’t be able to taste the nuance that makes a “great” spirit “great” after incorporating other flavors via infusion. For infusions, I don’t recommend buying the cheapest possible version (because garbage in – garbage out) but I also don’t recommend you splurge on high end stuff either. Start with the spirit you want to infuse.

COLD INFUSE FREE

(It’ll cause your ice to melt more than the recipe intended, and create a watered down drink.) Once it’s room temperature you’re free to mix! You don’t need the tea to be fridge-cold, but you don’t want to be mixing hot syrup into your shaker. Allow to cool before using in a cocktail.Since it’s probably still warm, it should dissolve pretty quickly In our example we created 8oz of syrup so we added 8oz (1 cup) of sugar.

Following the same ratio as Simple Syrup, add the same amount of sugar as you have liquid. (This one’s ours, but seriously it’s the best!) (If you’re using tea bags you won’t need to strain, but loose-leaf tea will.) Use a fine mesh strainer like the one below to strain out all of the tea bits. While you may get away with a bit of extra time, it doesn’t take long for over-infused tea to become bitter. Don’t be tempted to let it infuse longer in search of a deeper infusion.

Allow to steep for the time recommended by the tea package, once again.

This will increase the strength of the infusion without introducing bitterness. Follow the directions on your tea package, but use 4x the amount of tea. Plus, with the variety of teas out there the options are truly endless! You can find the instructions for making a tea syrup here Tea is one of the most basic (and frankly, delicious) syrups you can make.

COLD INFUSE HOW TO

Pretty awesome, right? Now that I’ve persuaded you, let’s talk about how to do it! (Can you imagine a martini made with pureed apple? Yuuuck.) But if you chopped up your apples and infused them in vodka or gin, then made your martini with the infused spirit, you’re likely to get some great apple flavor without weird apple residue and lots of extra water.

Fruit flavors are awesome in cocktails, but you don’t always want to add juice or puree. But if instead you made tea-infused syrup and used that instead of the simple syrup you were already going to use, it will no longer change the water content of the drink and you’ll have the tea flavor you were looking for. If you were to make a Gin old Fashioned and add tea, it would add tons of water and make it nothing like an Old Fashioned. Infusions are a great way to introduce flavors into cocktails without changing the texture or water content of a drink.įor example: say you wanted to make a tea flavored Gin Old Fashioned. You probably make infusions all the time and don’t even realize it! Making tea and coffee are both simple infusions: you put the tea leaves or coffee grounds in hot water and wait for the water to taste like coffee or tea. The result is an ingredient you can easily use in cocktails – a syrup or a spirit which features the flavor you added. So what does that mean in the world of cocktails? Basically “infusing” is a technique where you put an ingredient with the flavor you want (fruit, spices, herbs) into a liquid that you want to taste like that flavor (typically spirits or liquors.) After waiting a bit, you remove the flavoring ingredient. Infusion is the process of extracting chemical compounds or flavors from plant material in a solvent such as water, oil or alcohol, by allowing the material to remain suspended in the solvent over time.

Infusion is a fancy science-y sounding word, but in reality it basically just means the following: What is an infusion, and how do you “infuse” flavor?

Cold infuse