You all seemed to really like this topic when we talked about it previously. So, we’re going to show you the next stages of our season long project! Our home made, DIY Creme de Violette liqueur!
In all, we performed six distinct flower infusions of our Viola flowers over the season. We were able to achieve our desired color target, basically a very deep garnet color. As we mentioned previously, we are taking some liberties with our home made version of this liqueur, which is traditionally made from purple violets and not viola. But, one of our goals was to achieve a “deep” color. And I think we’ve achieved that!
When you perform any kind of natural infusion like this, it’s a great idea to filter your final product. The natural infusion process is not perfect. We use what could only be described as a very “DIY” approach to this, filtering our liqueur with a pour over coffee and a #4 coffee filter. This gets any impurities and detritus that made its way through the process out of your liqueur.
We opted to store the majority of our DIY liqueur in a used gin bottle. We hung onto a gin called “McQueen and the Violet Fog,” which seemed most appropriate for our viola infusion!
Overall, we’re quite happy with the results of this project so far. But, since this is our first time at it, we need some time to learn how to work with such a floral liqueur. We can tell with some initial tasting that we went “hard” on the floral infusions and probably could have used much less infusion. We can only describe it as a mouthful of flowers, which actually isn’t as bad as it sounds. Still, it’s a mouthful of flowers. But, this characteristic might be desirable as we intend to cut this down a bit into a “proper” liqueur.
Our next steps in this project are to learn how to turn our DIY flower infusion it into an actual liqueur. Our current version is fairly high proof (since we used vodka for the extraction) and isn’t at all sweet like the reference liqueur that we’re trying to achieve. We need to do some various experimentation with this, since we have no idea what we’re doing and there aren’t exactly great references out there to learn from. We have some ideas and generally knowledge about this, but we need to practice actual recipe crafting with our actual product.
Once we have a slightly cut down version of this infusion, we’ll easily be able to mix it into various drinks. Our target drink was an Aviation cocktail, which uses the “really hard to find” Creme de Violette. We’ll be really curious to see how these turn out compared to a legit Aviation. But, at this point, I don’t think we’re terribly far off the mark. (Which is perhaps surprising, since we only had a rough plan for this project!)
So, this is where we are at with the project for now! We’ll have a follow up post that will include our final Aviation cocktail at some point! But, we figured some of you might want an interim update on our seasonal project from this year. We’ll likely follow this up with one of more “more rare” winter season posts, just to let you all know we’re still alive and still thinking about “all things gardening.”
