Juniper Maceration

AceNZ

Motivated by a number of recent (and awesome) successes with fruit, I'm looking for a maceration-only recipe using juniper, coriander, and other gin-type herbs. Not distilled, so it wouldn't be gin, of course. More of a gin-inspired schnapps, I guess.

mark85

there are a few cold compounded or "bathtub" gins popping up on shelves in the UK. Im not terribly keen on the style, they taste harsh to me but they seem to sell well... One guy making it told me it takes him a week from starting a batch to bottling.

Since you are not heating the botanicals and alcohol you may need to use larger amounts of some of the herbs to get the desired flavour intensity?

AceNZ

When you say cold compounding, do you mean using essential oils?

Macerations are more interesting to me at the moment. I was actually thinking they might be too strong without distillation, rather than too weak, although that's just a guess at this stage....

jacksonbrown

Tried this yet?

AceNZ

@jacksonbrown said: Tried this yet?

No. Does look yummy, even though it's almost an anti-gin.

I used neutral + Fuji apples + cinnamon in one of my recent batches of schnapps. Simple, but fabulous!

mark85

They say cold compounding because it sounds fancy. They are macerating and then filtering

DonMateo

I tried it and i didnt like he results. It tasted like gin for sure but the taste was really strong and there was a heavy oil taste. I dont know if I was using too much juniper or what. I used 80 grams per liter but i think 50 would have been sufficient. It had a dark color as well. I am going to try again.

CothermanDistilling

you should try 20 and 30g/L... light crush (rollers 2-3mm apart) soak in the best neutral you can make diluted to 160 for 18-36 hours, remove, rinse, use rinse water to dilute to 80 proof or lower... I have bottles of 100g/liter of vapor infused for prototyping, so I think I know what the 80g/liter is....

dad

We make individual maceration of each component and blend after.

Some of these are tough...if you use to high a proof and macerate everything for the same amount of time, you break the cell structure of some and start to get off tastes from some herbs and not others. The time for each can be very different.

i.e. you create off tastes if you macerate anise, juniper (fresh and dry are dif) and orange zest in the same bottle of 65%. The anise needs two days, the orange a week and the juniper two weeks. dose that make sense?

Go look at how many big brands are compounded. I used to have a chart...

Some others distill through the juniper and add the other by maceration.

Best commercial gin story I have is from 2014 ADI. Famous master distiller for a rum distillery was there. He said they branched out into gin in late1960's. They wanted to say the produced vapor infusion gin, so it had to be distilled through a basket. They put a basket of juniper above the delpheg and distilled through it. Joke was, they used the same berries for months at a time (thousands of gallons). Only changed them during maintenance. Added the actual flavors by compounding.

Kapea

I hear Anheuser-Busch has been using the same hop cone to brew their beers with for decades now, just like that @dad. :))

DonMateo

Just as a update on the compounding thing I just tried a simple old tom Gin and a hopped gin with cold maceration and they turned out very nicely. The old tom just had 20g/l juniper 5 of Coriander 1 of Cardomon and a half a dozen cloves. Turned out very simple and drink able. That was very nice and simple with the cloves coming out at the end of the tasting. Nice mouth feel. The hopped gin had 30 grams juniper, 15 coriander, 2 of cardomon, 1 Angelia rook and .5 of lemon peel but 3 grams of hops. The hops comes out very nicely at the end of drinking it. A nice dry bitter tang at the end. Thanks to Cotherman for the guidance. And everyone else here.

AceNZ

I tried it, too. I started by making about 20 different single-ingredient macerations with 40%. Then, after taste testing, combined the ones I liked.

I ended up with juniper, coriander, angelica, cinnamon, orange peel and aniseed.

Very easy to make. The ratios required were quite a bit different from infusions.

The end result wasn't as clean as a vapor infusion on the taste side, but worked fine as a base for mixed drinks.