Today we're gonna make a coffee amaro.
Now an amaro is kind of a very broad category
of sweet liqueurs defined by their bitterness.
In fact, amaro is the Italian word for bitterness.
Now you might know more famous amaros,
like Campari, or Ramazzotti, or Amaro Montenegro.
There are enormous numbers of these things
and they're often quite regional.
Now we're gonna break all the rules around making amaros.
These things often take weeks, if not months to infuse
'cause you're gonna take some sort of booze
and infuse into them botanicals.
Could be roots, herbs, could be spices.
It doesn't really matter, it's a kind of regional thing.
Here we're gonna show you a technique
that you can get it done start to finish in 30 minutes
if you want to.
Though I will say taking a little bit more time
at certain stages will benefit the end results.
So once again, if people doing things
the non-traditional way really upsets you, look away now.
So we're gonna break this recipe into a few little stages,
and the first stage is to get the coffee flavor
into the booze.
Now, today I'm gonna be using some whiskey,
some bourbon whiskey.
Now I like it 'cause it's clean and it's sweet,
and it's not terribly expensive
to have it taste pretty good.
Now I would say don't spend too much money on this
because it's a waste of money
to really buy something lovely for this, just drink it.
But something like Maker's,
something like Buffalo Trace maybe.
Good, free of defect, enjoyable to drink,
but don't get fancy.
We're gonna start with 200 grams of whiskey
and there are gonna be losses along the way.
And at the end of all of this,
we might end up with between
140 to 150 grams of finished amaro.
So just know that going in.
What we're gonna use for our infusion is this,
which is a cream whipper.
Now a cream whipper is obviously fine for whipping cream
but they are great for infusing things with flavor.
So we're gonna add whiskey to this,
and then we're gonna grind 40 grams of coffee
to match the 200 grams of whiskey.
We're gonna grind it pretty fine, very close to espresso.
Something that would pull a disturbingly
fast espresso shot, but still kind of very fine feeling.
So it feels pretty close to espresso.
Now I'm just gonna use this V60 here
just as a funnel 'cause I didn't have a better funnel
to hand.
And then to that,
200 grams.
Now we're not gonna shake this
but we are gonna give it a good swirl together to combine.
And what we'll do is then add a nitrous charge to it
which is not the soda ones,
you want the cream whipper ones.
Lovely.
So we've pressurized this now.
And actually that gas is gonna start dissolving
into the liquid below a little bit.
And we're gonna leave this to infuse
for about five minutes.
Now usually I don't like extractions done
at room temperature, I don't like things like cold brew.
But we're not brewing with water here,
we're brewing with alcohol too.
It will extract certain flavors that water can't,
and that's really useful.
Now you will get a little bit more bitterness,
but we'll fix that in the next step.
Now at four minutes when you release the pressure,
don't be gentle.
Be aggressive, let it all out very quickly
that will be very disruptive to the ground coffee
and help with extraction.
You can hear that fizzing.
So now we're gonna filter it,
and we're just gonna pour it through a simple sieve.
It won't do a perfect job, but don't worry about that.
You are gonna lose some of the whiskey to the ground coffee,
there's nothing we can do about it.
And let's just throw this away.
So this liquid here, well it tastes pretty bad.
It's incredibly bitter, but it's got tons,
and tons, and tons of flavor.
What we're gonna do now is a lovely technique
called milk washing.
What we need for that is about 55 grams of whole milk.
Now I'll warn you now, this technique is a little bit
disgusting to some people.
What's gonna happen is we're going to add the alcohol
to the milk and stir as we do,
and it's gonna cause the milk to break,
and curdle, and trapped in those kind of curds,
'cause that's what they are.
Is gonna to be a lot of the stuff
that we don't want anymore.
So what we're gonna do is stir this
and then add the coffee booze.
What we can see,
is a curdling effect, which is disgusting
but entirely wonderful in terms of end result.
If we go over that 30 minute amaro,
you're gonna move straight to the next step.
But the longer you leave this now sort of settling out,
the cleaner and clearer the end product will be.
Now I'm mostly interested in this from a taste perspective
not a visuals perspective,
so I'm happy to proceed straight away
but at the very least, you're gonna need to wash
out your cream whipper, clean out your sieve,
because you're gonna need those things again in a second
along with whatever you strained into,
I'm gonna use my V60 carafe again.
Okay, so now we are gonna use paper.
So you're gonna put this together to filter again,
but you're gonna keep the sieve as well.
So we're gonna do a two stage filtration
of the curds, so to speak.
So what we've got in here is this kind of awkward
coffee cheese that we don't want.
We don't want this at all.
And then below it now we've got the last few bits
kind of being filtered out.
Now, if you're like me,
you have just no patience whatsoever,
you can speed this up a little bit.
If you pinch all of these filter pieces together carefully.
Just sort of seal off the top.
You can twist that top very gently.
Now, the harder you squeeze,
essentially the less clear
the liquid you're gonna get is gonna be.
I'm okay with a little squeeze.
If you squeeze too hard, you'll just tear the filter paper
and that would be bad, and a mess,
and you'd have to start over again
which you don't wanna do.
But just gently twisting to apply a pressure
does help speed up this clarification process a little.
So we've got our pretty clarified coffee liquid now,
tons of coffee flavor in there.
Tons of bourbon flavor too.
But it has been diluted slightly by that milk wash.
So essentially we've added some water,
a little bit of sugar, actually,
some of the lactose from the milk will be in here,
so it's very slightly sweeter.
So what we'll do now though, is infuse more flavors in there
and we'll use the same technique that we did before.
So we get our cream whipper.
We're gonna add our liquid.
We've got about 150 grams here.
To that, we're gonna add a few very classic flavors.
Firstly, we're gonna add some dried bitter orange peel.
We're gonna add a gram and a half of that.
You all recognize that smell, that flavor from things
like Campari, or other kinda citrusy things.
Next we're gonna add some gentian root.
This is very common in a lot of amaros,
it adds a bit of bitterness.
It's actually been proven to help with dyspepsia,
indigestion, and that kinda stuff.
Next we're gonna add just one
allspice berry that we'll crush.
Lovely.
In you go.
And next up is actually something a little bit different.
This is actually a Vietnamese cassia bark.
It's not true cinnamon, it's cassia,
a relation that smells very similar.
But this is incredibly aromatic, like incredibly aromatic.
You could use a regular cinnamon powder here
but I'm gonna grate some of this, about half a gram.
It has that really lovely, very pretty aromatic quality,
and a little bit of that almost heat
that you get from good cinnamon.
And then also a little half gram of good nutmeg.
Just very pretty, ah, lovely.
Next up, we're gonna add
about half a gram of minced Madagascan vanilla.
So everything is in here now, let's put it together,
and then we'll charge it once, give it a good shake,
and then discharge it very aggressively.
And then charge it again, and wait for five minutes.
One more charge.
And now just five more minutes of waiting.
Now while that infuses,
you can get on and prep the last few bits
and pieces for this drink.
You're gonna need a demerara syrup.
Now you can make this ahead of time.
It's two parts light brown sugar to one part water,
heat it up just until it dissolves and then cool it down.
So we've got some of that ready.
Adds a lovely kind of caramel quality to the final drink,
works really well with that coffee flavor that's in there.
You're gonna need an orange for garnish,
and potentially just a little splash of clean water.
That's kind of up to you.
You might wanna just dilute it down a little bit,
just if you prefer to drink it quickly
or you don't like too much booze in your amaro.
I'm gonna add a very small amount of water
just to dilute it a little bit down.
So you need some of that ready too.
And then our friend saline solution.
We've talked about this in the past, 80 20,
that's 20 salt, 80 water,
very useful for any kind of cocktail drink.
Now I know I've given you lots of data, lots of information.
This recipe has been written up,
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So infusion done, and again a rapid discharge
is always a good thing of pressure.
And then we're gonna do one final filtration through paper
but we're gonna lose a few more grounds of this sadly,
but we don't want any pieces of spice
floating around our drink.
And again, give that little soft twist and squeeze
just to get maximum yield out.
We just wanna get rid of those big pieces of spices.
So to this, we're gonna add our sugar.
We're gonna add 60 grams.
Again, if you make this and don't like the sweetness,
you can tweak it.
This is just the kind of sweetness
that I really enjoy in an amaro.
And I'm gonna add what seems like a tiny amount of water,
but just 25 grams.
And we're done, and we can bottle it now.
Now there's a reason this isn't a full bottle.
You wanna make what you're gonna use reasonably quickly
because this has coffee in it,
and I think coffee degrades quite badly over time.
I prefer to drink this fresh.
I would keep it in the fridge, not the freezer.
It will pretty much freeze solid in a very cold freezer.
So it's not hugely boozy.
It's probably about 20% alcohol at this point.
So when it's time to drink it,
get yourself a beautiful cube of ice.
You're gonna then pour on your measure of coffee amaro.
And don't forget to add a couple drops of saline to this.
Give it a gentle stir.
And then garnish with just a little piece of orange zest.
Oh that smells good.
That fresh orange hit is really nice,
but you can get a little bit more
of that coffee and that bitter orange coming through.
That is, I think a really lovely drink.
The coffee's there, it's playing a role
but it's not the star of the show, and that's what I want.
You can taste the bourbon, that comes through really nicely.
You can taste the coffee.
But you could give this to someone who doesn't like coffee,
who does like amaros, I think they'd really like it.
And you get that orange and that bitter orange in there too.
And the gentian provides a really distinct
and pleasant bitterness.
But in the middle there is this wonderful,
aromatic component of those spices.
That cassia, the nutmeg, the all spice,
they just play beautifully together.
Now you could do this a whole bunch of different ways.
You could adapt this base technique
with a bunch of different spices if you'd like that,
a bunch of different herbs if you like that.
You could start with a different raw material,
you could just do this with vodka
or something else if you wanted to.
There's no rules outside of Italy anyway.
So if you do this, let me know what you tried.
Let me know if you made some alterations.
You could drink this with just a splash of tonic
and it would be very good.
You could drink this just neat, and chilled,
and it would be very good.
Or like me, on a fat cube of ice
with a little orange twist,
and you've made a fantastic choice.
I'm gonna say thank you so much for watching.
I hope you have a great day.
God that's good.
That's easily the best one.