Coffee Liqueur ｜ Make Your Own
Coffee Liqueur
Equipment
- Mortar or Electric Grinder
- Measuring Cup
- Knife
- Cutting Board
- Scale
- Bowl(s)
- Coffee Filter
- Jar or Container with Lid
Ingredients
- 50 Grams Dark Roast Coffee Beans (1.7 oz)
- 20 Grams Chocolate Nibs (0.7 oz)
- 1 Vanilla Pods
- ½ Cinnamon Stick
- 2 Cloves
- 250 ml High Proof Vodka (1 Cup)
- 1 Part Simple Syrup (Optional)
- 600 ml Filtered Water* (2 1/4 Cups)
Instructions
- Use a mortar or an eclectic bean grinder to roughly break the coffee beans. If you’re using a grinder, just give a quick pulse or two. You don’t want fully ground coffee, but rather chunks of beans.
- Add the ground beans to your container or jar.
- Slice the vanilla pods lengthwise and using the back of the knife, scoop out the inner part of the bean. Add the cut pods and bean inners to the container with the coffee beans.
- Add the half cinnamon stick and cloves.
- Add the alcohol and seal the lid.
- Give it a good shake and then put it in a dark, dry place for 3 weeks.
- Give it a shake every few days.
- After the resting period, use a coffee filter to separate the coffee beans from the liquid. Use a separate jar or pot to catch the liquor.
- There will be a lot of residue left in the container,so you can add a little water to free it.
- Let it drain for about an hour and then throw away the beans.
- Optional, but recommended: Measure how much pure coffee liquor you have. This will help you make a more informed decision on how much water to add to get to a more manageable alcohol percentage.
- Add water to the coffee liquor to dilute the very high alcohol content.
- Put the coffee liqueur in a jar. It should be good for up to a year.
- Make sure you give a shake before using it, as it might separate a little.
Notes
Why DIY Coffee Liqueur?
If you’re reading this page, there’s a pretty good chance you have a bottle of Kahlua sitting in your cabinets. It’s also no secret that Kahlua is readily available and pretty cheap. You can get a 750ml bottle for around $20 in the US, and half that price in Japan. So, why bother taking the time to gather the ingredients and investing your skill into doing your own Coffee Liqueur?
Mainly because Kahlua is a poorly made coffee liquor. Don’t believe me? Pour yourself a shot and have at it. Does it even taste remotely like coffee? Honestly, it does not. You may have also noted how sickly sweet it is. It’s almost pure syrup, in fact. It’s thick and gooey. Worst of all, it obliterates any other flavors in a drink. That’s great if you’re drinking pond scum, but if you’re using anything half way respectable you’re just flushing it down the toilet.
Forget about getting a halfway decent White Russians when using Kahlua. The Dude does not abide!
Master Your Cocktail Destiny
The best part about making your own coffee liquor is that you can control two key aspects of the finished product.
- How sweet it is
- How strong it is
If you so desire, you can create a totally carb-free coffee liquor with 0g of sugar. This is the route I take.
A word of warning; it doesn’t taste very good.
Alcohol needs some sweetness to soften its harsh edges. With that being said, if you over sweeten the liquor there is no way to reverse that. Instead, opt for using simple syrup when you build your cocktails. If you go this direction, you can tailor make every drink. Want something really sweet, add in extra syrup, etc.
All that being said, this coffee liquor is fanatic all by itself when it’s sweetened a bit and served over ice.
In the same vein, you can control the alcohol content of the final product. If you so desire, you could keep it at its 96% purity. I wouldn’t recommend this, as it won’t taste all that good. It could also be dangerous. Really you should cut the alcohol with water until you get to around 20% (directions on that below). If you do want something stronger, you could aim for 40% alcohol. That would be akin to normal vodka or whiskey.
Smashing or Grinding?
The important thing is getting the right consistency. In this case, the beans and nibs need to be in fairly large, rough chunks. How you get there is rather inconsequential. Some people swear by the mortar. I’ve done it both ways, and the mortar does give a more consistent output when it comes to the size of the chunks. That being said, it is also a lot more labor intensive.
After doing a lot of Cold Brew Coffees, I have gotten good at using an electric grinder to get the results that I find favorable. The trick here is to do limit how much you put into the grinder at any one time. I limit it to a scoop and a half. There are some great filtering techniques on that page that I recommend reading.
If you don’t have a grinder, it might be time to reexamine your life choices.
Same goes for digital scale.
Getting your final Coffee Liqueur right
I used an over-proofed vodka that was 96%. An over-proofed alcohol is the way to go, as it will aggressively pull the flavor out of the beans in shorter amount of time.
I started with 250ml of alcohol. After the mixture of beans and vodka sat for 3 weeks, I separated the beans/spices from the liquid. As you would expect, the beans and nibs soaked up some of that alcohol. About 20% in fact.
So, after the filtration process, I had about 200ml of coffee liquor. That means I lost about 50ml of alcohol during the infusion process.
Since I decided not to add any simple syrup, I added 600ml of water to get to a final percentage of around 20% alcohol content.
If you were going to add simple syrup, start by using this recipe and making it before hand. You might need to do a little trial and error to get the mixture right for your taste. Generally, 1 part simple syrup would be the average amount added. In this case, one part would be 200ml. You would add a further 400ml of water in this case to arrive at the final 20% alcohol content.
You need something smooth, dark, and bluesy when making your coffee liqueur.