I was watching gin a video the other day where someone tried to recreate the original Coca-Cola recipe. The ingredients caught my attention, because they seemed to resemble a gin recipe (minus the juniper).
10 grams of orange peel
10 grams of lemon peel
4 grams of cinnamon
1 gram of nutmeg
1 gram of coriander seed
and lastly 4 grams of neroli or bitter orange, but I couldn't find any so I did some research and found that kaffir lime leaves are comprised 80% of neroli compounds so I used 4 grams of them instead.
It got me wondering, has anyone tried using a recipe like this to make a spirit? My first thought would be to make the 7X infusion and distill it like gin, and then to sweeten and color much like the original recipe. Or, leave it unsweetened and treat it like gin.
Learn from the past, live in the present, change the future.
Love this idea, I have a pretty healthy stock of neutral and am looking for inspiration and this seems like an awesome chance to experiment.
I have heard of some distiller trying to recreate a botanical spirit using Dr. Pepper ingredients but the sky is really the limit, you could do a classic root beer too.
Bradster68 wrote: ↑Fri Aug 11, 2023 3:30 pm
Only guessing but I'm sure "someone" has made a gin with various ingredients and left out the juniper berries. No?
It feels like the trend in gin right now is to be really light on the juniper. Like distillers don’t want to be tethered to it but know it needs to be there for marketing reasons. Fortunately the perks of hobby distilling is we don’t have to be bound by such things.
If you look at the old French distillation manuals you’ll see all sorts of botanical spirits. Over time I guess juniper just knew the right people and it really became the defacto distilled botanical beverage.
Bradster68 wrote: ↑Fri Aug 11, 2023 3:30 pm
Only guessing but I'm sure "someone" has made a gin with various ingredients and left out the juniper berries. No?
It feels like the trend in gin right now is to be really light on the juniper. Like distillers don’t want to be tethered to it but know it needs to be there for marketing reasons. Fortunately the perks of hobby distilling is we don’t have to be bound by such things.
If you look at the old French distillation manuals you’ll see all sorts of botanical spirits. Over time I guess juniper just knew the right people and it really became the defacto distilled botanical beverage.
Absolutely. And gin itself is an acquired taste. So maybe it is the juniper berries that have been admired by a certain crowd.
Lots of new recipes out there to try
I drink so much now,on the back of my license it's a list of organs I need.
tombombadil wrote: ↑Fri Aug 11, 2023 9:21 pm
Cola should have kola nut?
Historically, yes. Just because modern manufacturers no longer use kola nut doesn't mean that you shouldn't, especially if you have it available or grow it.
tombombadil wrote: ↑Fri Aug 11, 2023 9:21 pm
Cola should have kola nut?
Quoting myself:
_ _ _"The Kola nut is rich in caffeine and theobromine. Africans were chewing the flavorful and stimulating tree nuts long before Coca-Cola was ever invented. “Cola” is the proper scientific name of the plant “Genus” to which these nuts belong. The genus was originally thought to be closely related to the South American cocoa (chocolate bean), but now the two are placed in different subfamilies.
_ _ _While Kola nut seeds are harvested primarily from the Cola acuminata and Cola nitida species today, there are 100 to 125 other species of the Cola genus within the African tropical forest, with which they might be confused.
_ _ _Coca-Cola came about in 1886 when a pharmacist mixed sugar and carbonated water with caffeine extracted from African kola nuts and cocaine extracted from South American coca leaves. Fresh coca leaves were used in the beverage's syrup until 1903; after that the cocaine alkaloid was removed, but "spent" coca leaves or cocaine-free coca leaf extract continued to be used as flavoring".
I wouldn’t call it a gin, Dougmatt. I just wondered about following that botanical bill with the same method as one would make gin. Or, add juniper and it looks like a viable gin recipe to me.
Learn from the past, live in the present, change the future.
If you make it at 7X essence strength, you have plenty of options to try and might even settle on more than one type of finished product for the liquor cabinet.
A 7X juniper essence could be used to blend with it for gin experiments.
Naming can be a problem. Some of the products I make in my small stills don't really have names that I can borrow from the drinks that inspired them. Where there are simple rules, (like gin has to contain juniper), I abide by them. Fortunately, very few people get to taste my botanical heavy experiments, so I don't often have to explain an unusual name or method.