Make Simple Coffee Liqueur At Home

Chuck Sudo/Chicagoist

If it's January in Chicago, it means that we're busy making liqueurs at home. Spring is a few weeks (or months) away and the orangecello and limoncello won't make themselves.

We're also branching out a bit and decided to make some coffee liqueur, which isn't that time-intensive. For the recipe, we referred ourselves to our favorite cookbook, White Trash Cooking. We've featured a couple of the recipes from Ernest Matthew Mickler's seminal 1986 cookbook before and it still serves as both a campy send-up of and loving to Southern culture, and as a practical working cookbook. Mickler included a recipe for "After Dinner Coffee Liqueur" that calls for

8 cups sugar
12 cups double-strength coffee (instant will do)
One fifth of vodka
One Tablespoon vanilla extract

This made for a great opportunity to update the recipe. We don't do instant coffee, so we used four French presses of Sumatra Permato Gayo coffee from Bridgeport Coffee Company. This roast has a heavy body but light acidity.

While we have no problem with vanilla extract, we decided instead to split and scrape two Madagascar vanilla beans and add them to the mix. Finally, any liqueur recipe that calls for vodka can be made better by replacing it with grain alcohol. (Note: Don't pour grain alcohol into a hot liquid. Wait until it cools.)

If you use the measurements called for in the recipe, it yields a gallon of liqueur. If you buy growlers of beer from brewpubs frequently, this would be a nice use of those empties. We're letting this liqueur sit under the same kitchen sink we cure guanciale for six weeks to absorb the vanilla bean and temper the kick from the grain alcohol. Right now, it has a bit of a punch from the spirit and could do with some settling.