Amari 4 and 5

I enjoy continuing to make amari. I wrote about my three in a series of posts (1, 2, 3), and now I'll share a few notes about numbers 4 and 5.

For my fourth amaro, I used the 20-50-30 AWS ratio that I learned about for number 3. For the ingredients, I pulled together some things that I thought would make for a nice, light, citrusy amaro. This would be a good foil to the intense #3. Here's what I used:

• 2 tsp. juniper berries
• 1/2 tsp. anise seeds
• 1/2 of a stubby long pepper
• 1/2 tsp. decorticated cardamom 
• pinch dried sage
• 1 tsp. dried orange peel
• 1 clove
• 2 allspice berries
• 1/2 tsp. coriander seeds
• 1 tsp. gentian root
• 1/2 tsp. cacao shells
• 1 tsp. dried peppermint
• 1 pinch dried rosemary
• 1 tsp. dried lemongrass

I set these for a week in a 50% alcohol-water solution and then filtered and bottled it. It has a very nice citrus flavor and, like its predecessor, is not too sweet. This concoction really sold me on that 20-50-30 AWS ratio. This amaro is good as a digestif, but my favorite thing to do is to use it in an old fashioned cocktail: 1-1/2 oz bourbon, 1/2 oz amaro, a touch of orange syrup, served on the rocks. I dubbed this batch "Amaronge you glad I didn't say 'banana'?"

Incidentally, that orange syrup was the result of an attempt to make an elevated syrup. I packed orange peels in sugar to extract the flavorful oils like in a video a friend sent me. I think the video exaggerated the effect, but my results were still good. After letting the peels macerate with the sugar for a day or two, I ended up just rinsing the container with some water and then heating it until it became an excellent orange syrup. The peels would have gone in the compost anyway, so this was a worthwhile.

Speaking of saving things from the compost, let's talk about my fifth batch. I bought myself a bunch of new amaro ingredients for my birthday. When they arrived earlier this month, I now had what I needed to replicate the Open Source Liqueurs Base Amaro recipe. My first step was to save some grapefruit rinds from ending up in the compost and remove the zest from the pith. The recipe calls for three grams of grapefruit peel... but is that fresh or dried? All the zest I could salvage still did not register as a gram on my kitchen scale. I had no fresh oranges, and so for reference, I measured three grams of dried bitter orange peel:

How is one to compare amount by volume of fresh zest and dried peel? It's not at all clear to me, but these two look approximately the same. I marked in my notes that three grams of bitter orange peel was about 1-1/2 teaspoons. 

The Open Source Liqueurs recipes are by weight, which is a good and proper way for fancy people to cook, but my scale is clearly not up to the task. Hence, I measured where I could, substituted where necessary, and winged it as inspired. Mine ended up like this:

• Some fresh grapefruit zest
• 3g bitter orange peel
• 10g Turkish rhubarb root
• 6g gentian
• 1 tsp hyssop (which still didn't measure as a gram on my scale so maybe that's close to 0.5 g?)
• 1 tsp dried peppermint (no spearmint available)
• a little broken stick of cinnamon (weighing under one gram)
• 1 tsp whole dry rosemary (again, under one gram)
• about a teaspoon of myrrh granules
• 1/2 tsp. decorticated cardamom
• 1 clove
• a generous pinch of dried sage

Here's how it looked once everything was mixed together.

That's a nice light amber color. After a week, it was much more intense:

The lighting here makes the maceration jar look dark brown, but there was also a slight purple hue when held to the light. It was really beautiful, and that got me excited when I gave the jar its periodic swirl.

Here's how it looks in the glass after sweetening with demerara sugar syrup, which also brought it to the proper AWS ratio.

It's good, but it is very grapefruit-forward. If you feel like grapefruit, this is your thing, but if not, then it's not quite right. I've tried it in some cocktails, but grapefruit and orange are just not the same. I'd like to try a riff on this recipe some time later with either less grapefruit, less grapefruit maceration time, or increased fresh orange zest, or some combination of those.

Because this one is really a spin on the Open Source Liqueur's recipe, I've named batch #5 as "OSL v1.0."