Ever since flipping through the pages of Infused, a book on infusing liquors with flavors (complete with lots of cocktail recipes using your creations), I've been itching to infuse some more liquors. In past years, I've made apple pie (cinnamon, cloves, apples) vodka, mandarin orange vodka, pumpkin vodka, and even bacon bourbon... with varying levels of success. The bacon and pumpkin were fairly recent projects, and the pumpkin turned out to pair wonderfully with a little amaretto - and was best very very cold. The bacon bourbon (made by submerging raw bacon in Maker's Mark bourbon for several months) was less successful. I think there's an issue of the alcohol acting as a solvent on the fats in the bacon, which means you end up with a very oily end product. Perhaps it needs more filtering.
But today, as I was finishing off a bottle of red wine vinegar, the shape of the bottle reminded me of a Florence Flask - spherical bottom with a thin cylindrical neck. Perhaps it was a college chemistry flashback, but I decided I wanted to put something useful in the empty bottle, so I washed it out, and did my best to wash off the label. Then I harvested a bunch of fresh mint from our Aerogarden, crushed it up in my mortar & pestle, added a little light rum to rinse it out, and funneled it all into the bottle. Then I filled the bottle up with rum, and capped it off. We'll see in a couple weeks how it turns out, but I think it's going to be perfect when Dan (or guests) want a Mojito.
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