I’m writing a recipe book (very slowly but it’s on the way) so I don’t want to give away personal recipes but I’ll tell you the basics of making your own liqueur potion cause its very basic info anyway and most people with decent knowledge of cooking and cocktail crafting know this probably.
If you love to work with (edible) herbs and know their correspondences and how they chemically effect your body you are off to a good start in crafting your alcoholic potion. I will basically tell you how you can make your own liqueur.
A liqueur is a cordial that is a spirit with added flavor and sweet because of the syrup. NOT to be confused with an infusion. An infusion is when you take something like vodka or rum and put tons of shit in it like herbs and fruit and let it sit for one to two weeks until the flavor is completely infused. Infusions with vodka is basically the same thing as a flavor extract. It goes great in cooking but drinking it straight is kind of gross. Liqueurs on the other hand is more pleasant cause of the syrup which is sugar water which the water allows for you to taste more of the flavor and the sugar does the sweetening part.
If you don’t want a sweet drink for whatever reason an infusion will do just fine but to help taste the flavor you can serve an infusion on the rocks or mix it with a bit of water because the water helps bring out the flavor for some reason that someone could probably explain. (As a bartender I get a lot of requests of hard liquor mixed with club soda or mixed with water cause they want to like taste their liquor which is bizarre when its something like gin or whiskey but I can’t really argue with them I just have to make it lol. One day my curiosity got the best of me and I tried it and I realized you can taste the flavor of the liquor more, though it’s still not something I would personally want).
Anyway back to the liqueur crafting!
So there’s been like many posts on witchy tumblr about the magic of infused waters and the combinations of those ingredients? Liqueur crafting is just like that!
you can make a liqueur with fresh chopped strawberries, vanilla bean, damiana (damiana tends to lower blood pressure so I’ve heard so be careful), and the base of the syrup will be partially brown sugar.
Take 1/2 cup filtered water and 1/4 white sugar and 1/4 brown sugar.
I personally like to put the water first in the pan to simmer then add the sugar to stir in. (You want to make a loose syrup so like half water half sugar is good.)
Wait until the syrup is bubbling. It doesn’t need to be super thick like syrup you put on waffles cause it’s going to be mixed in with liquid anyway and you want the substance to be well infused.
Once its mixed well together and bubbling add the chopped strawberries and let it simmer together. Maybe help the syrup go along by squishing the strawberries on the bottom of the pan.
Once you have a strawberry syrup, add the opened vanilla bean and damiana to infuse in the simmering syrup.
After a few minutes remove and strain (I usually use a pasta strainer over a wide measuring cup), and squish everything as much as you can then take the measuring cup and pour it into an empty and clean bottle 1/3 or 1/2 of the way.
If you want it to have it’s own flavor just fill the remainder with decent vodka or if you want it to have a ‘spiced’ flavor add dark rum.
Put the vanilla bean from the squished stuff in there and shake it as much as you can and let it sit overnight and it’s good to go in like 10 hours (sometimes even wayyy sooner, but letting it sit for a while guarantees good flavor). Let this charge with rose quartz and carnelian sitting on or around the bottle!
Other tips: I like to make certain potions depending on planetary positions so for love maybe pick a friday or when Venus is in an interesting positon.
For the example liqueur I made up above you could probably enjoy it mixed in a hot tea toddy with chamomille vanilla tea. (Very simple process. There are many tea companies that make chamomille vanilla tea so you just warm up the water, pour a 1/3 of your glass with the liqueur and top the rest with the hot water to infuse with the tea bag and such. You can mix it in a vanilla milkshake for a cold drink or an iced milky chamomille-vanilla tea. It can also go great with cream or strawberry soda/ a strawberry daiquiri (but make your own lemon mix instead of a store brought sour mix), I mean you can get creative with it of course just giving easy examples that won’t take long to put together a nice cocktail!
You can also garnish this with sliced strawberries on a long toothpick you can buy at cocktail accessory sections in your supermarket that you can lay over the glass’s mouth. You can also buy sugar crystal wands of any color at party city and use it as a stirring stick- especially if you are making the tea toddy since they won’t have to add any extra sugar if they are a sweet tooth. Serve it in a fancy goblet. Serve it to someone on a full moon. Serve it in this sultry looking night gown. Be creative like the witches I know you are to be.
For prosperity you can do this process with making a syrup with pear, thyme and honey and making a liqueur with a vodka or gin base.
For courage/strength you can use orange, mango, chili, lemon in a syrup then mix it with rum. (Or whatever you associate with courage of course its dependent on your correspondences).
You can add in food coloring of course! Store your liqueurs in pretty decorative bottles!!
Great spirits to make liqueurs with is mostly vodka and white and dark rum. Gin can be ok sometimes. Other spirits are usually good with infusions and sometimes not even that since most are to be enjoyed as they are. But liqueurs are nice cause you can enjoy it straight and it tastes good!
