Crème de Cassis Triple Threat

[NormandieStill]

OK. First of all it's more of a double threat and a bit more, but that looked rubbish in the title line.

Act One - Crème de Cassis

Ingredients:
- Cassis (blackcurrant) berries.
- 95% Neutral (or thereabouts)

1. Rinse the berries and remove any stalks or leaves. Put them in a large jar and pour over the neutral until the berries are covered. Close the jar and put it somewhere to macerate for a week (I think a couple of days may be enough, I don't see a difference after a week).
2. Pour out the maceration into a glass or stainless container through a sieve to separate the alcohol. Put the berries to one side. Measure the volume and abv of the collected liquid. The abv reading is probably not 100% accurate but should get you close enough for non-commercial use.
3. 1. Now comes the maths. If you don't want the explanation of what and why, then skip to the next step. Crème de cassis de Dijon is a controlled appellation and one of the published requirements is a minimum of 400g / litre of sugar and most commercial offerings are around 16-20% abv. I've made this at 25% abv which seems to work quite nicely but you can adjust to taste. If this was a simple dilution then we'd just add water to reach our target abv. If we didn't care about the sugar content, we could dilute with the same quantity of simple syrup. But to reach a target sugar concentration, we need to make a specific sugar solution to dilute with. Sugar dissolved in water occupies about half it's weight in volume. In real terms 1kg of sugar dissolved in water takes up about 500ml of space. So if you dissolve 1kg of sugar in 1 litre of water you get 1.5 litres of simple sugar.
      Let's use a worked example. Imagine we recover 800ml of alcohol at 65%. First we work out how much volume we need to add to our collected maceration to reach our target abv. Total alcohol = 800ml x 0.65 = 520ml. Target abv = 25% so total volume = 520 / 0.25 = 2.08 litres. The added volume is total volume - maceration volume = 1.28 litre.
      Now for the sugar. If we are making 2.08 litres then the total sugar content should be 400g x 2.08 = 832g sugar. We know that once dissolved that will occupy 416ml, so our recipe for the syrup is added volume - 416ml = 864ml water + 832g sugar (Which is pretty close to a simple syrup, but obviously the maths varies depending on the collected abv!)
   2. TL;DR Plug your numbers in here (volumes in ml, weights in grams)
      Total Volume = (Collected Volume x Collected abv) / Target abv
      Sugar (g) = Total Volume x 400
      Proofing Water = (Total Volume - Collected Volume) - (Sugar / 2)
4. Make a syrup using the values you just calculated. Heat the water a little in a pan and stir in the sugar. Heat and stir until the liquid is transparent. Let the syrup cool.
5. Once cooled, add the syrup to the maceration and stir well. It'll be tasty straight away, although I tend to find the syrup leaves a strange "flatness" on the tongue (ever tasted simple syrup made from beet sugar?). After 24 - 48 hours some magic happens and the flavours come together. The alcohol and sugar act to form a roundness in the mouth which coats the tongue with the fruit flavours from the berries.
6. Enjoy on ice (if you've got a sweet tooth), or pour a measure into a wine glass and top up with dry white wine (borgogne aligote is the standard) or sparkling wine.

Act Two (One and a bit?) - Distiller's Treat
This is a wholesale copy of the Panty Dropper(tm) method. Take the berries that you saved from Act One and put them in a bowl / jug / saucepan. Sprinkle some sugar over them, mixing them up a little to distribute the sugar over all the berries. Cover and leave for at least 24 hours. At the end of this period some juice will have collected. Pour this out into a container and put to one side, and sprinkle some more sugar over the berries. Repeat this until you feel that the amount of juice being extracted is not worth continuing. I find that three rounds works for me. Do not throw the berries away. At this point you have a sort of crème de cassis, but you have no idea of the abv, nor the sugar content. In my experience it tends to be slightly more intense (and maybe a little more tart) than the result of Act One, but you don't get a lot. You can either mix it back into the crème, or childishly keep it to yourself, refusing to share with anyone.

Act Three - Jam
If you have white cupboards in your kitchen. Or a white worktop. Or a white apron. Or anything white within about 2m of where you're preparing this, you might want to sign the divorce papers now! This. Will. Stain.

1. Weigh the berries that you had left over from Act Two. Per kg of berries you want to add 800g of sugar and the juice of 1 lemon (~45ml). Put them in a saucepan and heat and stir (and stir... and stir). You can crush them a little as you go. At first you won't believe that the dry mix of sugar and berries could ever simmer but it will. And when it does, turn off the heat.
2. Using a fine sieve over a pan, crush the berries with a spoon to separate the flesh from the pips and skins. If you have one of those tomato deseeding gadgets, this would be a great time to use it. Otherwise you're in for a bit of work. When you're done, you'll have a pan full of berry flesh and juice which is giving off a faint alcoholic vapour.
3. Put the pan back on the hob and start heating, and stirring (again). If you have a sugar thermometer, you're aiming for 104°C. Careful. It sneaks up on you quickly. If you don't, put some plates in the freezer before you start step 1. Then when you start to see bubbles forming on top of other bubbles, take a plate out and spoon a drop onto the plate. Let it sit for a minute and push through it with your finger. If it forms a skin and wrinkles, then it's ready to pot. Pour into sterilised jam jars, screw on their lids and wait for the satisfying popping sound as the the lids pull down under the vacuum as they cool.

If after cooling it's seems a little too liquid, either save it for putting on ice cream, or reheat it and try again. There's no alcohol left by this point so you can share it with your kids. And it's amazing how much flavour is left in the berries after the maceration.