Hi, Friends of Cocktails! It’s strawberry season - or at least it was when we made and filmed today’s recipe… but don’t worry because today’s delicious strawberry liqueur recipe can easily be done year round using frozen strawberries too!
In fact, freezing strawberries when they’re at the peak of their ripeness is a great way to guarantee the best flavor, without having to worry about your strawberries growing mold. This is something we used to do a lot when I was a kid to preserve fresh fruits, along with jams, syrups, cordials, and shrubs. My mom would also make a variety of fruit liqueurs, which must have rubbed off on me as well I guess, especially with today’s Strawberry Liqueur.
Our liqueur will be delicious in cocktails, but you can also enjoy it as a wonderful treat over ice. To make it we'll need strawberries, sugar, grain alcohol, vitamin C, and Pectinex, a specialty enzyme that breaks down pectin structure, helping to make a clearer fruit liqueur. But if you don’t want to get your hands dirty, the best alternative is Liber & Co.’s Pacific Strawberry Syrup!
This Syrup is made with sun-ripened strawberries from America's West Coast. Its pressed juice is then blended with cane sugar to create a vibrant syrup with the perfect amount of tartness, and gum arabic providing the rich mouthfeel. So if you want the best strawberry cocktails this is a great option, but now let’s make some Liqueur. It’s Strawberry Liqueur Time!
DIY Strawberry Liqueur
● 1200g Fresh or Frozen Strawberries
● 204mL 96% Grain Alcohol
● 100g Sugar
● 2.4g Pectinex
● 0.8g Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C)
As always for liqueurs and infusions, make sure your fruits are well cleaned, and ideally organic, but if you can grow them yourself that’s even better. Great thing is, that for something like this, they really don’t need to look perfect. The riper, the better, as far as flavor goes, just make sure nothing has gone bad yet.
Now blend until smooth and place this mixture in the freezer. We want to freeze away a part of the water to increase both the sweetness and the strawberry flavor. This is a technique called cryo-concentration and we have used it before to make Melon Liqueur and Pineapple Liqueur with no added sugar, and all we need is to measure the weight of strawberry juice.
I ended up with 1260g of strawberry juice, which once frozen we’ll cut into chunks and place them into a strainer placed over a bowl. Don’t forget to weigh the bowl so that we can track the amount of juice as it melts. We’re aiming for 630g or 600mL of concentrated strawberry juice, which is half of what we started with, meaning it should be at around the 19 BRIX mark for sweetness.
To turn it into a liqueur, the next step is to add the right amount of alcohol. For every 100mL of juice we’ll need 34mL of 96% alcohol, but if the most you can get is high-ABV vodka you need to stop the melting of strawberry sooner to get a more concentrated juice. Also, if you used different amounts of strawberries or if you want to scale this recipe up or down, you can also use the Liqueur Calculators here to save time.
With our alcohol and juice mixed, our Liqueur is now ready to be bottled, and don’t forget to add a label. We’ve now made a 25% ABV, or 50 proof Strawberry liqueur that’s not as sweet as most commercially available options, but how does it taste? You’ll get strawberry dominating in all aspects, with its sweet, ripe, slightly acidic profile, and a long, berry aftertaste with the perfect amount of tartness.
This Liqueur is perfect for cocktails, because you can always add extra sweetness to your cocktails with a barspoon or two of rich or simple syrup. Plus, you can even get away with using this type of a liqueur as a base for your cocktails as long as you balance it well, but we’ll talk more about strawberry cocktails in a future episode to give this liqueur time to settle down a bit and develop its flavor. Until next time, cheers, Friends of Cocktails!