Simple recipes for complex flavour: Crimson Cacao Liqueur

Here’s a recipe for a breathtakingly delicious liqueur made with eau de vie we’ve double-distilled in our alquitar. It’s a simple recipe—a maceration of a handful of carefully selected potent and colourful ingredients—but the result (much like our Hibiscus Flower Tea recipe) is much more than the sum of its parts.

So it is with flavour—magic generated from the interactions of ingredients and calibrated with balance. And the beauty of making your own blends is that you can take any recipe and continue to experiment, sample and tweak it to your preference.

Crimson Cacao Liqueur

150g cacao nibs
25g freeze-dried raspberries
5g dried bitter orange peel
1/2 stick of true cinnamon
400mls of eau de vie (double distilled)* at 40% ABV

Coarsely grind the cacao nibs, raspberries, cinnamon and bitter orange peel (be careful not to over-process them to a powder). Place in a large jar, cover with the eau de vie and macerate for 10 days.

Strain through a sieve to remove the bulk of the solids, then strain through a coffee filter several times. Pour into a bottle and allow to sit for a few days for the extra-fine solids to precipitate out and settle to the bottom.

Decant off your liqueur into a beautiful bottle—something that will show off the deep, rich colour—and use for celebration and connection with those you love.

Cacao is bitter by nature, so feel free to make up a sugar syrup and sweeten to your taste (use a simple syrup with a 1:1 ratio of sugar to water). In fact, legally you can’t call a spirit a liqueur unless it has been sweetened, but we will leave this decision up to you! Whatever you choose, you will still be able to enjoy that potent feel-good chemical mix that cacao delivers.

*Why double distilled? We do this to refine the flavour and make the spirit smoother on the palate. If you would like to learn more, our Foundation Distillation course in Distilling Alcohol takes you through this entire process, from start to finish.