Episode 077

Featured Cocktail: The Whiskey Bramble

This week’s featured cocktail is a blast from the summery past. You remember summer, right? Well, in keeping with the subject of this episode, which is homemade fruit liqueurs, I wanted to feature perhaps the most iconic summer cocktails: the whiskey bramble. This cocktail – to be fair – can be enjoyed any time of year, but there’s just something about it that lends itself to front porch sipping on a warm summer evening.

This cocktail contains an important ingredient: creme de mur, which means, roughly translated, “nectar of the woods.” It’s a French blackberry liqueur, and it’s sort of the basis the DIY project we talk about in this episode.

To make a whiskey bramble, you’ll need:

• 2 oz Whiskey
• ¾ oz Lemon Juice
• ½ oz Simple Syrup
• ¾ oz creme de mur

This is a cocktail that you build right in the glass, and it’s important to use crushed ice here if you have it available. So fill a nice double rocks glass with crushed ice, add your whiskey, lemon juice, and simple syrup. Give that bad boy a quick stir. Then carefully drizzle the creme de mur over the top as a float. This drink, since it leans in the direction of a smash or a julep, can be garnished with any sort of fresh herbs or berries you have available, but I like a sprig of mint and a blackberry skewered with a cocktail pick.

Show Notes

Before we get to the recipe for this black raspberry liqueur, there are a few links and tips we need to share.

• One is a link to the bottles we used from Specialty Bottle.
• Another is a link to a brix calculation guide. This is a deep dive, but feel free to email us with questions!

Finally, check out these sexy labels that we made for our Black Raspberry Liqueur!

Black Raspberry Liqueur Recipe

Please keep in mind that this is an approximate recipe, and if you’re going to try your liqueur with a different fruit base you might want do choose different spirits or tweak the sugar a bit. Remember, use this as a guideline and customize to your taste and your desired end product.

That said, our scaled recipe for this project is:

• 1 L vodka
• 375ml Cognac or Armagnac
• 6 cups black raspberries
• The peels of 3 lemons
• 6 cloves

This will yield your fruit-infused spirit mixture, to which you’ll need to add a decent amount of sugar. The overall output for our infusion was about 4L of liquid, which is going to vary wildly in both volume and ABV depending on how much liquid your fruit adds to the mixture.

Below is a gallery that takes you through this first phase of the process, step-by-step.

In our case, once the ingredients were strained out, we then added:

• About 3 cups of water
• And roughly 9-12 cups of sugar

This sounds like a lot of sugar, but as you heard during the episode, it was necessary.

The end yield for this project was about 32 250ml bottles, or 8 L of Liqueur, so expect your liquid volume to increase anywhere between 50 and 100% when you add the sugar and water.