A Beginner's Guide: Liqueurs

In 2014, on New York City’s Lower East Side, archaeologists unearthed a green glass bottle with “Elixir of Long Life” noted by way of identification. The story is reported on at length in NYC’s “DNAinfo,” an online neighborhood news journal. The bottle was discovered with a larger cache of 150-year-old bottles, a relatively young version of an “elixir,” the quest for which dates back to the ancient world.

It’s fair to say that liqueurs emerged both from ancient medicine and ancient alchemy – one hopes there is no “modern” alchemy. Like amari, the bitter cousins of liqueurs (although amari are technically a subset of liqueurs), the earliest forms of liqueur were meant to be medicinal. The relatively modern NYC version contained aloe, alcohol, and gentian root – an ingredient common to gin, amari, and liqueur and once believed to aid digestion. The presence of aloe indicates it was meant as a medicine.

But medicine is only half the story. A handful of the earliest liqueurs, like Chartreuse and Benedictine, were made in monasteries, likely as an herbal remedy, but the connection to religious orders isn’t coincidental. In addition to questing for the means to convert common metals like lead into gold, alchemists also concocted serums and potions in their search for the so-called elixir of life. More a fantastical trope than a legend, the elixir of life – it didn’t have to be in liquid form, by the way – was believed to be a secret recipe that would grant the drinker eternal life. Early forms of the elixir contained poisons like mercury, as well as common ingredients believed to have divine origin like honey, an ingredient that would shape the direction of elixir making as a precursor to liqueurs.

At its core, liqueur is a neutral spirit or redistilled wine like Brandy to which a form of sugar and flavoring components have been added. The process is called compounding. In the distillation process, alcohol is heated until it vaporizes, and then the vapor is collected and cooled, resulting in a higher concentration of alcohol but a purer form of the distillate. Compounding typically happens after distillation, but it’s not uncommon to redistill with ingredients like plant and nut solids in the distillate.

The method of adding flavors varies from distiller to distiller, but there are only a few overarching options: infusion, percolation, and maceration. Infusion can occur prior to distillation, but there will be a noticeable thinness of flavor components. Percolation works very much like a traditional coffee maker in that flavoring components are kept in a basket, and the base spirit circulates and recirculates over the ingredients. This method has a higher intensity of flavor than infusion, but maceration – usually with fruit, floral, herbal, and nutty solids – creates the most intense flavors of the three.

Other than the method, the primary differences fall into four categories: fruit, nut, herbal, and creme. The latter includes products that begin with base spirits like Irish whisky. All the categories have well-known examples, like Chambord for fruit, Frangelico for nuts, Chartreuse for herbal, and Irish creams for creme. As a rule, all can be enjoyed without adding them to a cocktail, either neat or on ice, but many make excellent cocktail additions: It’s another method of adding sweetness, flavor, and alcohol to popular base spirits.