Limoncello Part 2

Here is part two of the making Limoncello. We left off with some lemon rinds steeping in some vodka. Roughly one week along we are ready to finish it off and have a drink! The first step is to strain the zests out of the liquid. Don't throw them away because they make delicious candied lemon zests! I usually pull them out using chopsticks and set them aside. Then I use a funnel with a coffee filter in it to get rid of all the tiny pieces of zest floating around.

Now that you have particle free lemon flavored vodka it is time to add some simple syrup to sweeten it up and bring down the alcohol content a bit. I have seen a few different recipes that call for various ratios of booze to sugar. Some (like Giada's 2 and 1/2 cups of sugar to a single fifth) would be sweet enough to make a five year old sick. In this most recent batch I used 1 and 1/2 cups of 1:1 simple syrup. This is just under half of a fifth (750ml/2 = 375ml = 1.58 cups). This is just on the threshold of too sweet for me. If it isn't icy cold it won't be very pleasing.

After filtering. A fifth sure isn't much liquid out of its fancy bottle...

After you have added your simple syrup let it all mix together and cool down in the fridge before you take that first sweet sip!

After adding simple syrup.

Drink up!

PS: I promise one of the next three blog posts will contain my first original drink that wasn't auwful. (Hint it is named after a fictional drink from the "Life Aquatic".)