I made Milk Liqueur

Im so excited to show off my latest weird crafty project... making milk liqueur!

Evidently this is an old recipe that infuses Grappa with the tastes of sweet chocolate milk. Its a little scary, seems contradictory to my every notion of what not to do with milk. And Grappa - seriously?! I was really intrigued by this recipe because my father loves Grappa and I think its particularly foul! Evidently you can't even buy Grappa in most states (its like grain alcohol, but made of grape skins) - but Oregon not only sells Grappa, I found some that was locally made here in Portland! Usually you can only buy Italian Grappa and this imported product can be very pricey... the local product was much more cost effective. I could have used grain alcohol (for the really cheap version - and yes I can buy this in Oregon as well, there seems to be not limit to what kind of liver pickling booze Oregonians will sell ya) and I also could have substituted vodka for the Grappa. All the blog articles I read about making milk liqueur used vodka. I used Clear Creek Distillery Grappa.

Ingredients:

I used equal parts of

• Grappa
• sugar
• whole milk

plus a few ounces of shaved 70% dark chocolate, half a lemon and a vanilla bean

Its pretty simple, you put it all in a clean jar and shake occasionally. This concoction sat on my kitchen counter for 10 days looking thick and strange. After filtered the ugly goop I ended up with a golden liqueur that tastes like milk chocolate for big girls. The best milk chocolate ever. Although its a sipper... a whole glass of this stuff would render me uselessly drunk and consume half of what I made! Instead I bottled it in these tiny little bottles. All I got out of a whole bottle of Grappa was four tiny bottles of liqueur. And it took SO LONG to filter. Good grief I went thru a whole box of coffee filters and a package of cheese cloth, filtering and re-filtering. But one drip at a time my golden liqueur slowly accumulated.

Wow its good. Surprisingly good. Although I don't know if I am patient enough to do this again. I am tempted to geek out and do a comparison between using a base of Grappa v. Vodka v. Everclear. But honestly all the filtering made me a little batty - and I find the smell of grappa to be pretty disgusting - it permeated the whole house while I was filtering for hours. But the taste is nothing like the smell. The taste is awesome. Chocolate milk for big girls. Oh yeah.

if you are as intrigued as I am - here are the blogs I read that got me started in this crafty quest

• Making Milk Liqueurs
• Milk Liqueur