Amaro Primo

Last night, I finished processing my first batch of homemade amaro. I used Marcia Simmons' recipe at Serious Eats to get started. Knowing how the Internet has consumed some of my favorite recipes over the years, I will share what I actually used, which was a slight difference from Simmons' recipe just due to what I had on hand.

• a broken, incomplete piece of star anise (original recipe: 1 teaspoon anise seeds)
• a few dried sage leaves (original recipe: 6 fresh leaves)
• a few ragged but technically fresh mint leaves (original recipe: 6 fresh leaves)
• 1 sprig fresh rosemary
• 1 allspice berry
• a few whole cloves (two or three, I don't remember)
• 1/2 tsp gentian root
• 3 cups 190 proof Everclear / grain alcohol

I was able to get the Everclear at Muncie Liquors on Jackson. I ordered the gentian root from Mountain Rose Herbs when the boys and I were also ordering some other esoteric spices for my wife's birthday a few weeks ago. We do not have a mortar and pestle, but we do have a spice grinder. Unfortunately, it is almost exclusively used for processing Szechuan peppercorns; I chose against using it since I did not want to make a numbing amaro. We ended up blitzing the spices in the blender to try to break them up. It did bust them up a bit, but there was so little volume that it had a hard time pulsing them.

I macerated the herbs and spices in the alcohol for three weeks as per the original recipe. Note, however, that the recipe called for 150-proof spirit, and my more recent reading leads me to suspect that I could have stopped the maceration earlier. I kept the mixture in a Ball jar on the counter near my tea and coffee area, which meant I would remember to give it a swirl each morning when making my morning drinks. The most significant change was over the first two days, when it changed from basically clear to beautifully green. About two weeks into the process, I did some more reading where it was recommended to keep the mixture in a dark place. Oops. The last week or so, then, the jar was kept in the liquor cabinet.

Emiko's post at Food52 explains that for 95% alcohol like mine, one typically wants a 2:1 ratio of simple syrup to infused alcohol in order to get to an appropriate ABV and sweetness. That post also mentions that you can get four cups of syrup by combining 3 cups of water with three cups of sugar. This is a helpful ratio to know since it's not otherwise obvious to me how the respective volumes of sugar and water combine to determine the volume of the syrup. A little simple algebra reveals that I needed 4.5 cups of sugar dissolved in 4.5 cups of water, giving me the six cups of syrup I would need to mix with my three cups of alcohol.

On my wife's recommendation, I used a fine metal tea strainer to filter the solids from the alcohol, and this worked great. There may be a few very fine flecks in the resulting liquid, but it was much easier than dealing with multiple passes through a cheesecloth or spice bag. Once the syrup had cooled off (although it was not yet room temperature, because it was late and I was feeling impatient), I mixed the two together and poured the result into a half-gallon Ball jar, with the overflow going back into the smaller jar in which I had done the maceration.

Earlier, during maceration, I occasionally took the lid off to smell the concoction. It basically smelled like alcohol: the fumes from the booze overpowered any sort of pleasant, herbal aroma that I had hoped for. This made me a little nervous. I was surprised then when, as I was straining the alcohol, I could almost pick up two different aromas: one was the intense alcohol but the other was a more mellow, pleasant scent.

Here's the result:

The recipes say to let the combined alcohol and syrup sit for two weeks or so for the flavors to continue to develop, but of course, I couldn't help myself from pouring a little glass for myself. I like it, but I find myself lacking some of the words to describe what it is like. It reminds me a little of absinthe⁠—although maybe that is in part the color⁠—mixed with something grassier. It might be the bitter gentian or the herbal sage that I am picking up on. My wife hasn't tried it yet, as she was early to bed last night. I am eager for her opinion since she has a better ability to name flavors than I do.

I actually have a second batch macerating in the liquor cabinet already. Originally, I was going to wait until this one was done, but then I decided to just go for it, to mix up a bunch of things that sound like they would go well together and see what happens. Watch this blog for a follow up in a few weeks.

My biggest question right now is what to call this. The title of this post is just a bit of fun with Italian, but I thought about perhaps naming them as a sequence. Popes? Letters of the alphabet a la Ubuntu releases? Let me know if you have an idea in the comments.