Have you ever had the desire to make your own liqueur? We here a BoozeBasher have. I raided my father’s recipe box and decided to share what he claims is an old family recipe for making a coffee liqueur. It makes about a half-gallon of the delicious liqueur, and it ends up costing about half the price of Kahlúa. Enough with the small talk, let’s get right into it…
Ingredients:
750ml bottle 1 tablespoon single vanilla 6 heaping tablespoons of
of cheap vodka of glycerin bean instant coffee
3 3/4 cups of sugar 2 1/2 cups of water
Notes: Don’t waste your money on expensive vodka for the recipe, as it really won’t make any noticeable difference in taste. The instant coffee brand really doesn’t matter either. I would suggest just getting a standard brew. If you really like how this recipe turns out, you may want to try some specialty brew like a hazelnut or French vanilla. I can’t make any guarantees on the taste with the specialty stuff, so experiment at your own risk. The glycerin should be available at any drugstore and probably some grocery stores. I know it sounds weird to add this stuff, but it gives the final product a smooth thickness. In your next batch, you can play with the amount you add a bit to tweak the consistency to your liking.
Directions:
Pour all of the sugar into a pot, and then add 2 cups of water.
Heat and stir until all the sugar is dissolved and the mixture looks pretty clear.
Pour all of the instant coffee into a smaller pot. Add the vanilla bean, and pour in the glycerin.
Heat 1/2 cup of water in the microwave to nearly boiling, and pour it into the instant coffee mixture. Let the mixture sit for a few minutes.
Next, dump the now brewed coffee mixture into the sugar water pot. Dip the smaller pot in the larger one to ensure that everything goes into the big pot.
Pour in the entire 750ml bottle of vodka, and mix everything well. If there is still a little coffee that is not dissolved, heat the entire mixture until everything is dissolved. Turn off the heat, and let everything sit to cool for awhile.
Pour mixture into a container. I prefer to use an empty half-gallon vodka bottle. It should just about fill it.
We decided to do a little blind taste comparison of the homemade coffee liqueur and the popular Kahlúa brand.
VS
The results were pretty interesting. The general consensus was that the Kahlúa was a little more pleasant to sip on the rocks, but our homemade liqueur mixed better. The homemade coffee liqueur was a little thicker in consistency and had a stronger coffee flavor. That extra thickness and coffee flavor gave white Russians a more rich and almost chocolate-like flavor. If you fancy yourself a big fan of coffee, you may find the homemade liqueur more enjoyable all around than Kahlúa, and it will cost you about half the price to make it yourself. If you are a big fan of Kahlúa, get up off your lazy butt and give this recipe a try. You may just fall in love with it.
Also check out our review of Kahlúa.
Comments
Wow, a bold new direction for the website! I like it!
Question though, wouldnt’ you NOT want to heat the mixture after you add the vodka? (Infact let it cool before mixing?) I would think the alcohol would evaporate fairly rapidly under heat. After all, I dont want the atmosphere stealing all of my boozes.
Have you guys tried this recipe with good vodka and good coffee? I would immagine a tastier outcome, but you’re the experts!
Only warm the mixture with the vodka a little bit and ONLY if the coffee has not completely dissolved. It shouldn’t take much heat for very long to finish the job. The quality of the vodka really doesn’t matter because the coffee really overpowers all of the vodka’s flavor. I would think gormet coffee may produce a better result, but I have yet to try it. It’s quite good with regular Folgers or Maxwell House. I’m sure any brand will do.
I cant wait to try it… Whos ugly hand is that in the picture?
Thanks for the recipe! It’s quite good. I particularly like how there’s no waiting, shaking, and filtering crap involved. I did modify it a bit though.
It didn’t say how much glycerin to use, so from the photo I assumed 1 tbsp. I put in about 2.5 tbsp for good measure. Also, I substituted the vanilla bean for 3 tbsp of pure vanilla extract (other recipes say to use 1/2 a tsp as a substitute but it can hardly be tasted anyways). The coffee flavour is quite strong, which makes it good for mixing, but maybe it’d be good to use 5 heaping tbsp next time for drinking straight or almost straight (although the alcohol content is quite diluted as is). Also, as I stirred the sugar water, I heated and stirred the pot with coffee simultaneously to help it completely dissolve. After combining it, I let it cool to around room temperature in the fridge, and I mixed it some more as I checked the temperature. Lastly, I added the vodka, mixed it again, then poured it back into the 750 ml vodka bottle and the rest into a 1.14 L sambuca bottle, and refridgerated both. It filled both to the top! A perfect 1.89 L.
Thanks again, I won’t forget this one. It’d be a perfect gift for my coffee-loving friend.
By the way, obviously things like this will save more money the more it’s made, but I wanted to mention how much it cost anyways (in Canadian dollars):
$22 - 750 ml ICEBERG Vodka (it was good stuff on sale, couldn’t find anything much cheaper anyways)
$4.50 - 100~ ml Glycerin (at the drug store)
$8 - 200 g Maxwell House (classic instant coffee)
$4 - 2 kg Rogers White Sugar (didn’t have enough sugar on hand)
$11 - 150~ ml Pure Vanilla Extract
$3.50~ - Tax.
Hmm it looks pricey, but vodka is the only short ingredient for probably the next ten or so batches. If I could make ten batches total, it’d come out to around $25.1 per 1.89 L (for perspective, that’s $9.95 for 750 ml!)
I didn’t realize that I forgot to include the amount of glycerin. The recipe calls for 0.5 tbsp to 1.5 tbsp, so I went with 1 tbsp as the middle-ground. I believe it’s the ingredient used to make the drink smooth. 1 tbsp worked well for me, but experiment to see what you like best.
Speaking of the Glycerin… I was looking for that at the drug store and found glycerin for applying to dry skin, is this the correct product? What is the chemical name on the back of your bottle?
For example:
Glycerin “blah blah” ……….. 99.8%
I know it sounds weird, but that’s the stuff. I’ll check the bottle eventually, but I refuse to get off my fat ass at the moment.
This does not seem to be a waste of time; I guess only so if you’re not into saving some money and enjoying homemade delicasies. It’s a wonderful recipe, and I appreciate all the details!
I followed this recipe to a tee, (except the glycerine, which I didn’t want). Yep, it was pretty much what Kahlua is, and that would have been fine, if only I was drinking it only for myself. But, I wanted to share it with my favorite bartender over Christmas. He already had a lot of Kahlua, so I didn’t think that would impress them too much. So, I got an idea to add some Ovaltine to it, to make it kind of half chocolate, half coffee. That went over a lot better, not only in taste, but there is this urban legend around that Ovaltine and alcoholic beverages are a good combination, not necessarily just for taste, but to replentish vitamins and minerals the drinker loses a lot of on a binge.
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