Kahlua Especial

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sbnas
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Joined: Tue Jun 21, 2022 5:58 pm

Kahlua Especial

Post by sbnas »

Hi all!

I made my first batch of neutral in about 12 years the other week and decided to try get some kahlua going. I initially followed the recipe in the first post on this thread and while it was nice I was after something a little closer to Kahlua Especial.

This is "Rum and Coffee Liqueur", it is 35% abv compared to 16% for standard kahlua and has richer, espresso based flavour. I find it gives kahlua based drinks a bit more of a kick and is more enjoyable over ice than normal kahlua. The problem is, it is often not stocked in shops here in Australia and has to be bought duty free. This may not be the case anymore but I haven't seen it in any of my local bottlo.

Ingredients
100g brown sugar
50g white sugar
220ml water (plus some additional depending on the ABV of your neutral)
50g fresh, course ground coffee beans (french press grind)
100ml of espresso (I pulled 2 double shots and slightly over extracted up to the 100ml mark)
1 tsp honey
1 tsp vanilla bean paste (you could use extract or steep 1 bean)

Method
1. Mix sugar and water in a pot on high heat until just beginning to simmer.
2. Add ground coffee, stir to combine and remove from heat.
3. Sit for 10 minutes and add espresso, honey and vanilla, stir to combine and let cool to room temp.
4. Filter

I added ~300ml of 65% neutral and topped with water to get to 750ml.

Changes
What I will change next batch is filtering before step 3 and adding the sugar after filtering. I believe the sugar makes the filtering process a lot slower.

The recipe is not perfect and in the current state I don't think it is that great drinking on ice, that could be though that my neutral is fairly fresh and could do with some time to settle. It does work well mixed with cola though.

Notes
Kahlua Especial is 33.3g/100ml of sugar. My recipe is only 20g/100ml as I didnt want such a sweet drink. Especially as it was going to be used added to some cola to make black russians.

Lots of recipes use more white sugar than brown, or at least equal amounts. I wanted the caramel sweetness found in Especial so I swapped them around and used more brown.

I aimed for roughly 1 shot of coffee per 200ml final volume as that is pretty standard for when you drink a normal milk based drink. The 50g ground coffee is based on a coffee/water ratio of 1:15 which is what I normally use for french press. With the two lots of coffee I figured this should give me a decent, natural coffee flavour without the need for any instant powder.

It lacks the slightly syrupy mouth feel you get in commercial liqueurs. It probably needs a slight boost to the amount of espresso shots to match the Especial but it is still damn tasty as is. I haven't had any age for longer than about a week so will need to save this current bottle as long as I can to see how the flavour changes over time.

I am going to post a side by side comparison between my recipe and the original for comparison.
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8Ball
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Re: Kahlua Especial

Post by 8Ball »

Thanks for posting. I’m looking at doing a Kahlua with a 50/50 mix of neutral (Ted’s), barrel aged dark rum (mine), and raw sugar with panela.
From what I gathered on the kahlua especial website, they use good beans to make coffee/espresso then blend with sugar, water, and rum.
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