Thursday, December 6, 2007

A taste of the holidays

The holiday season is fast approaching, and now it's time to start the experiment we've been leading up to for a while: spiced cider vodka. We have done several multi-ingredient vodka infusions before, but never with more than two ingredients; this one, on the other hand, will include a whopping five. The goal is to make apple the strongest flavor, but to include notes of cinnamon, orange, cloves, and nutmeg. We recently created clove infused vodka and nutmeg vodka to fine-tune our processes and determine the timing, whereas we have created each of apple, orange, and cinnamon vodkae numerous times before.

We began with a gratuitous photo of all the ingredients together, but we only used two of them initially.



To begin, we are starting with apple and cinnamon. Traditionally, we have infused each of them solo for two weeks, so we used that as a basis for our timeline. Cinnamon vodka tends to be very strongly flavored, so we only used a single stick (rather than the usual three), and will evaluate over time whether it needs to be removed early (or if more should be added, for that matter).

As for the apple, we are going with the methodology we decided was optimal in the Big Experiment, replacing the apples every few days throughout the experiment's run. We began by slicing an apple into eighths. We are still using Granny Smiths, as we always have; one day, we hope to do a Big Experiment-style comparison of various apple types.



Once the apple was sliced and cored, we placed the cinnamon stick and apple wedges into a science jar, added vodka and topped it off with a spoonful of sugar to aid the infusion.

The other ingredients will be added along the way based on their individual infusion times. We are planning the following schedule for the experiment:

Day 1: Add cinnamon and apple
Day 2: ---
Day 3: ---
Day 4: ---
Day 5: Replace apple
Day 6: ---
Day 7: ---
Day 8: ---
Day 9: ---
Day 10: Add orange slices, replace apple
Day 11: Add nutmeg
Day 12: ---
Day 13: ---
Day 14: Add cloves
Day 15: Complete!

This is, of course, tentative, and could change depending on experimental conditions. We'll let you know how it goes!

1 comment:

Heather said...

Yummy yum yum! Can hardly wait for the results!