Botanicals

What could be better than giving your drink or cocktail a personal touch with your spice selection. In addition to the standard choice - allspice - cinnamon and green cardamom - we offer a range of spices that can provide a unique and unexpected result. Such as the tena'adam (passion fruit pepper) or the siltimur (cedar), but also the bucay, the champion among black peppers in terms of smokiness. Delicious in gin, just like both of our cubebs.

Try some rosemary, juniper of course, or some mbongo seeds instead of a blade of lemongrass, alone or as a trio!

Keep in mind that dried spices are not 1,2,3 rehydrated. The best way to use your botanicals is to give them time to release their flavor by making an extract. Use the drink you want to spice up or a drink that is flavored with it  combines  or make a syrup. Larger fruits or fruit pods  juniper or cardamom are best  first bruise.

Gin for example

Try making an extract of finely ground mbongo with some peel of a good organic Amalfi lemon in gin  and make your alternative Lemon grass gin and tonic. Feel free to serve it with a fragrant green blade of fresh sereh - from your own herb garden? - to stimulate the taste buds.

Three more infusions  using gin as an example:

  • bucay pepper (smoke) with two Nepalese berries: siltimur (cedar citrus) and raye timur (wood grapefruit) in gin, with some fresh blueberry (Boreal cedar gin)
  • red sansho pepper, green cardamom, cinnamon buds, juniper berries, a touch of yuzu juice and a leaf of sansho cress in gin  (Roku gin)
  • cubeb pepper, juniper berry and also this time mbongo, the lemongrass pepper, or lemongrass (Bobby gin)

Whiskey

Give a twist to your Old fashioned whiskey by not using date syrup but making a syrup from a  flavorful sugar (demarara or muscovado) with Ceylon cinnamon and cinnamon buds. Such a syrup is also delicious in  your Moroccan carrot salad (made with carrots, raisins, ginger, saffron, some garlic, honey with cinnamon or date syrup with cinnamon or this cinnamon syrup).

Another infusion,  for Sour whiskey this time:  cinnamon buds with a hint of maple syrup in whiskey.

Vodka

In your vodka a citrus accent is very nice. Try a citrus pepper like raye  timur, ma khaen, andaliman or sansho. Plenty of choice.

Some Tasmanian peppers in your  Vodka is magic. The berries give off a great taste, and an enchanting color. A variation on that is an infusion with red voatsiperifery, not just for the color.

Join there  add some finely chopped celery and you get a delicious extract for your Bloody Mary. Ground red voatsiperifery with or without celery in vodka (Pepper vodka or bloody mary)

By the way, Pepper vodka can also be made with a popping black pepper, such as Tellicherry or Wayanad

White wine

White wine: sangia! Add a dash of a syrup of Peruvian ginger (so delicious!) with cardamom. Always use a tasty sugar, not granulated sugar or brown sugar, but demarara or muscovada. If you make - without the sugar - an infusion of the ginger and cardamom in white wine, you can create your own version of a 'martini' on the rocks in no time.

A herbal extract as a drink

In the beverage industry, sonication is often used to eliminate the time-consuming  infusion process to be drastically shortened.  Indeed with sound.A sonicator or ultrasonicator  exerts so much pressure  on the  botanical that the cell wall is broken open and the cell contents are immediately released. Sonication is  essential for releasing the aromatic compounds of very  hard ingredients such as wood chips  for  whisky, bourbon or brandy. In barrels it takes years for these to be released, and to a lesser extent the hard and dense structures  of tree bark  and evergreen leaves.

Soft and delicate ingredients  such as rosebuds and saffron, give their aromatic content  easily free, not only the desired notes, also the less desired ones, and the trick is to eliminate the latter. So far.

It is  certainly not easy to find the right balance between the components of an extract,  also  because the quality of the basic ingredients can vary from batch to batch, time and temperature can play an important role. You have to be able to control. Our advice  is therefore: start with a recipe that is not too complex, perhaps even with making a solution with only one ingredient. For example, one pepper. And only when you are satisfied add a second ingredient, preferably a volatile one such as citrus peel, because that is quite gives quick results.

It could just be that  your extract you like so much that you would like to drink it. Then do that :-)