OK, so it’s finally time for us to reveal one of our labors of love for this season. One of a kind and as far as we’re concerned, pretty darn OG, we tried our hand at crafting a homemade version of Crème de Violette this season. This is “part one” of this series.
If you’ve never heard of Crème de Violette, don’t feel bad. You aren’t missing out on some big thing in the modern era. Alas, we’ve pulled this idea out of the mid 1800’s, back in a day where this liqueur was quite a bit more popular. Crème de Violette is a rather obscure liqueur used as a core ingredient in the Aviation cocktail. As an Alaskan, though, you’d be hard pressed to find a bar that stocks it for at least a few thousand miles.
Our inspiration came from some of the riffs we’ve seen on the Aviation where wild (or domestic) blueberries are used to get somewhat close to the color of proper Crème de Violette. We figured we were practiced enough flower growers and preservationists to navigate an entirely different take on it, where we actually tried to make a version of the base liqueur with flowers we grew.
What we’re practicing here is a somewhat more obscure form of preservation called infusion. For those that have been around, you’ve seen us practice infusion by doing what we’d call “flavor extractions” when making things like strawberry and raspberry liqueurs. But, in this case, we’re primarily going for a color extraction, so the goal of our infusion is to pull the color from our flowers. In our case, we’ve pursued a deep garnet color as opposed to the traditional dark purple of our reference liqueur.
For about six weeks now, we’ve been regularly infusing our “production grown” violas with a very neutral vodka to extract the color of our flowers. We started with a micro batch and as the colors become more dense, we have continued to add more vodka to the infusion. We generally try to infuse the flowers only for a couple of days, or enough time to extract the pigments from our violas. At this point, we’ve done about four infusions and have been able to achieve the deep garnet color we had intended. Our endpoint is a very dark colored infusion that will contribute to a highly colorful cocktail.
We will admit that we’ve taken quite a few liberties with our riff on the Crème de Violette. While it’s traditionally made from violets, we are obviously using viola as our flower base instead. We’re also using vodka for our extraction method with the intention of leaving it full strength. (About twice the ABV of a traditional liqueur.) The original Crème de violette is usually somewhat sweet, but our intention is to make a “high ABV liqueuer” and then use sweeteners plus a mixer at the time of making a cocktail. (Or, possibly play with small microbatches of an actual liqueur.) At the home level, it’s both safer and easier for us to work with mid-proof alcohols than any kind of sweetened and mixed down liqueur since practically nothing can grow in such a high ABV base. Plus, it gives us a lot of flexibility to navigate a subject we that we’re still deep in the process of learning.
Some of you may recall from our Flower Friday on violas awhile back that some violas will produce a substance called ionone. This substance can desensitize receptors in the nose, making it difficult to get more than one “sniff” of the violas. Our infusion here very much has this behavior. Upon smelling it, our first sniff is incredibly floral. But, subsequent smells are highly muted. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out in our final cocktails, but it should give a fleeting floral backdrop that’s quite intriguing.
This has been a really fun project so far. We’re looking forward to what can come of this and we’ll finally get to sample it at the end of the season. We’ll certainly be putting up a post of our final product (the actual Aviation cocktail) and will discuss further what we’ve learned about this infusion.
