Creme de la Creme

Homemade Fruit Crèmes


There are an awful lot of brands of fruit liqueur on the market, and there is an even bigger range in their quality. When I first attempted to make my own fruit liqueurs, I held out hope that I could make something that tasted better that some of the poorer brands. I did not expect to be able to make liqueurs which hands down beat everything out there.
But then why not? Fruit crèmes are made with fruit, sugar, alcohol and water. That's it. And having made some properly, it became clear why the bad brands are so bad. They just don’t have much fruit in them, if any, and clearly use fake fruit aromas to bolster their intensity. Even with the good brands who make liqueurs properly with no shortcuts, the liqueur will have been made many months before you are drinking it, and they will lose some freshness of fruit flavour in this time. The liqueur recipes here you can drink the moment they are ready and the difference is remarkable.

There are several books on the subject of making homemade liqueurs. They are a very useful tool to start with, but I find that they all are a bit over simplified and the end products a little amateurish, dare I say. There are techniques not discussed in them to clarify your end products. I have tried 2 methods which work well, and have their own benefits and disadvantages. A clear product not only looks far better, it has a better mouth feel, less astringency or bitterness on the finish, and lasts longer, and for these reasons are an absolute must when trying to make something better that you could buy in.

My technique for making fruit crèmes has several stages and is rather time consuming, but I feel that it extracts the maximum amount of flavour and thus gives the best intensity in the resulting liqueur. With fruit crèmes, it is essential to use high ABV spirit. The higher the ABV, the better the alcohol strips flavour and colour from the fruit. Polish Pure Spirit does a good job at 80% ABV. I have also used 96% alcohol which I brought back from Italy with me, where you can buy it in any supermarket, as many people make their own homemade liqueurs (Every southern Italian will tell you that their mum/dad makes the best limoncello in the world) and the intensity of fruit flavour in the resulting liqueur is excellent. 40% or 50% vodkas simply do not work as well.

The first stage is maceration in alcohol (for those who don’t know the difference between maceration and infusion, maceration is done at low temperatures, infusion at high temperatures). I have read several sources that say to macerate the fruit for a month, but I feel that one week is sufficient, though if you have the time 2 weeks is better. High strength spirit is very efficient at extracting flavour, and raspberries, blackberries and blackcurrants are all very small, so the alcohol does not have far to travel to extract flavour from the centre of the fruit.
The best fruit to use is the best frozen fruit you can find. Your fruit supplier will be able to source something good for you, as many patisserie chefs use frozen fruit, as the fruit sugar content is far superior to fresh fruit. If you do not need to worry about a fruits shelf-life in a supermarket, and its perishability on its way there, then you can pick fruit at its absolute ripest and immediately freeze it. Freezing fruit destroys the cell structure, and so is a terrible technique to preserve fruit if you want to maintain is texture, but in liqueur making the texture of the fruit is completely irrelevant, as we will be filtering every last bit of cellulose from the drink.
Using frozen fruit also helps to reduce the maceration time, and this may explain the discrepancy between what I have found in practice and what I have read in sources. Frozen fruit has already had all its cell membranes broken by the act of freezing, so as it thaws in the alcohol, the alcohol does not need to waste time diffusing across the membranes.
The second stage after draining off the liquid from the fruit is to add sugar to the fruit. This draws out more liquid and flavour due to osmosis, in a gentler way than squeezing or centrifuging. This also means that the sugar we are using to sweeten the liqueur is strongly flavoured with the fruit and this help the final flavour intensity.
The last stage, when this sweetened liquid is removed is to add water to the fruit, twice. This washes out any remaining sugar, flavour and alcohol from the fruit.
For these recipes some of the directions might seem a little vague, but this is because you have to taste things as you go along and act accordingly as fruit flavour and water content vary from fruit batch to batch. Also, depending on what you are going to use the liqueur for, you might want to adjust the amount of sugar you are going to add. If you are going to make predominantly aperitif style drinks, you might want to hold back on the sugar content. If you are going to use them as a sweetener balanced with sour, you will want to keep the sugar concentration higher.

This technique is good for Framboise, Mure, Fraise, Griottes, Myrtille,

• Take a 2 litre jar with a swing lid. Completely fill the jar with frozen fruit (approx 1 kg) Shake the jar gently to pack the fruit down.
• Fill the jar with high ABV alcohol (approx 1 litre). Make a note of how much alcohol you have put in (Important if you want to know to work out the final ABV)
• Close the jar and leave for 1-2 weeks. Turn the jar whenever you are walking past.
• Strain off all the liquid and reserve. It will be more than the 1itre of alcohol you put in, as water will have been extracted from the fruit.
• Add sugar to the fruit, and leave for 2 days (notes on how much sugar to add are below)
• Strain off this liquid and add to the reserved alcohol. Press the fruit through a sieve.
• See how much reserved liquid you now have. It will probably be around 2 litres. If you want to obtain a liqueur around 25% ABV, and you started off with Polish Pure spirit then you will need to add a further 1200ml of water to the fruit, 600ml at time in order to end up with 3200ml at 25%. Each time, leave the water for 4 hours, turning the jar regularly.
• Once you have added this water to the reserved alcohol, pass all the liquid through a fine muslin.
• clarify the remaining liquid (see below).

Notes

Sugar Content – For most fruit aim for 250g sugar per litre for a normal fruit crème.
If you are going to use it in more aperitif style drinks, add around 180g sugar per litre. By sugar per litre, I mean in the final liqueur, so for 250g per litre and 3200ml of final liqueur, you need to add 800g of sugar.
Griottes - As they have a lovely sour taste, only add around 90g per litre, as more sugar hides this sour edge. You can always add more sugar, but you can’t take it away.
Mure – All the fruit crèmes are ready to use once they have been filtered, except the mure. Mure will need a further 2 weeks ageing, as there is an astringent pithy taste that takes a while to disappear.
Fraise – At no stage whatsoever must you press the strawberries. Pressing the strawberries cracks the seeds and the freshness of the flavour plummets.
ABV calculations – to work out the volume of the final liqueur, use the following equation:

Volume of Final Liqueur = (Volume of high ABV alcohol used) x (ABV high strength alcohol)
(ABV Final Liqueur)

Clarifying your end liqueur

As mentioned, I have tried 2 techniques for clarifying liqueurs. They are using pectin Enzymes and using wine filter pumps. Both work well. With pectin enzymes, the cost is very low, and the process rather satisfying, but it takes around a week and there is a reasonable amount of waste. With wine filter pumps it is very quick, there is little waste, but is a much more expensive option.

Pectin Enzymes.

Pectin occurs in most berries, and is responsible for the haze you will have in your liqueur. Pectin enzymes make the pectin molecules clump together until they are big enough to fall out is suspension and collect at the bottom of the jar. You can buy Pectin enzyme online from winemaking suppliers, and you only need use a couple of teaspoons.
Simply stir the enzyme into the liqueur and leave for a week.
What makes this rather satisfying is after 2 days or so, a crystal clear line starts to appear at the top of the liqueur and slowly moves down the jar over the course of a week.
The enzyme does not affect the taste of the liqueur, but you are left with a sizeable amount of liqueur at the bottom of the jar which you cannot use. To separate the liqueur layers, simply siphon off the top clear layer, squeezing the tube when you get near the bottom cloudy layer, to slow down the flow and not agitate the bottom layer.

Wine Filter Pumps

Wine filter pumps are great. In minutes you can turn a big demijohn of cloudy liqueur into a crystal clear liqueur. The small amount of leftover liqueur can be added back when filtering the next batch to eliminate nearly all wastage. The only issue is the cost of the pump and the filters which are a bit of a commitment. The pump costs around £150, and the filters around £2.50 a time. The filter pads come in 3 grades, 1 being the finest and 3 being the least fine. Grade 3 works fine, and doesn’t clog up as quickly, although using the finer grades does extend the life of the liqueur. If you are interested, a good entry level pump is the buon vino mini jet. There are several internet suppliers who sell it in the UK.