Give the gift of homemade booze: 23 easy recipes for DIY liqueur (2024)

FAQs

What is the easiest home made alcohol to make? ›

Hard Apple Cider is definitely the easiest way to go. There is a recipe on HomeBrewTalk that is very popular as it's extremely easy to make. Essentially you get red wine yeast and mix it with 5 Gallons of store bought apple juice and 2 pounds of dextrose. You need a carboy and an airlock, but that's it.

Most homemade liqueurs start with vodka. This spirit is an ideal base for liqueurs because it's colorless and flavorless, making it the perfect blank canvas. Start by creating some of the most popular liqueur flavors, like coffee, amaretto, and Irish cream — they all rely on vodka for their kick.

In English, moonshine is also known as mountain dew, choop, hooch (abbreviation of hoochinoo, name of a specific liquor, from Tlingit), homebrew, mulekick, shine, sneaky pete, white dog, white lightning, white/corn liquor, white/corn whiskey, pass around, firewater, and bootleg.

Curaçao liqueur is traditionally made with the dried peels of the laraha (Citrus × aurantium subsp. currassuviencis), a bitter orange that developed on Curaçao. Spanish explorers had brought the progenitor of the laraha, the bitter Seville orange, to the island in 1527.

Is Home Distilling Illegal? Short answer – yes. According to federal law, home distilling is strictly prohibited. The only legal way you could distill spirits at home is if you are recognized by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) as a qualified distilled spirits plant.

Kilju (Finnish pronunciation: [ˈkilju]) is the Finnish word for home made alcoholic beverage typically made of sugar, yeast, and water. A picture of a cheap fermentation vessel (regular plastic buckets of 10l) with integrated fermentation lock (by drilling a hole inside the bucket and inserting the lock herein).

You probably want to stick with liqueurs like Grand Marnier. They are tremendously smooth and still deliver 40% ABV. And make sure you try the higher level releases.

The Production Process

You can use 7kg of Glucose Powder (Brewing Sugar) instead of sugar. This will produce a cleaner, better way and will give you a purer alcohol once distilled. Add the Tripled Distilled Yeast Sachet and mix well. Now take the Sachet of Carbon and gently massage this to get rid of any solid lumps.

Liqueur should be stored in a cool, dark place and ideally upright. Once opened, the bottle should be tightly closed and consumed within a year. Ensure clean and sterile working conditions to extend the shelf life of your liqueur. This also includes the use of sterilized bottles and equipment.

It works like this: Pick a juice with at least 20g of sugar per serving, add a packet of specially designed yeast, plug the bottle with an airlock, and wait 48 hours. Just like the fermentation process used in winemaking, the juice's natural sugar is converted into ethanol, with a byproduct of carbon dioxide.

How to make hooch at home? ›

Banana flavoured liqueurs, which French producers call "crème de banane", are based on neutral alcohol (usually sugar beet) flavoured with an extract made from both a distillation and infusion of bananas, and sweetened with sugar (typically 400 to 450g/l).

Blackberry liqueur (Crème de mûre)

Crème de Fraise / Strawberry Liqueur.

It works like this: Pick a juice with at least 20g of sugar per serving, add a packet of specially designed yeast, plug the bottle with an airlock, and wait 48 hours. Just like the fermentation process used in winemaking, the juice's natural sugar is converted into ethanol, with a byproduct of carbon dioxide.

Making alcohol is easy. Take a sugary liquid, add sugar-eating yeast, and wait. Sanitation is the most important part of any fermentation process. You want to make sure everything that touches your liquid pre- and post-ferment has been fully sterilized with a no-rinse sanitizer.

The simplest primary alcohol is methanol ( CH ₃OH), for which R=H, and the next is ethanol, for which R=CH ₃, the methyl group.

The best spirits to sip neat, without mixing with anything else, include whiskey, bourbon, Scotch, tequila, mezcal, gin and rum. If you're unsure where to start with these, no worries.