I currently have five tinctures in my cabinet that do a lot of the heavy lifting in nearly everything that I make. I have three bitter herbs: wormwood, cinchona, and gentian, as well as bitter and sweet orange peel extracts.

Sources

I purchased the herbs as well as the orange peel that I have right now from Penn Herb. Unfortunately, I don't have an exact formula for the current batch of bitter tinctures. (This is why the blog is necessary; to record my notes in plain english.) All I can tell you is that each was created with a handful of the herb in question steeped for 1 week in 4 ounces of Grave's 190 grain alcohol and then filtered. They are very powerful. I dole them out by the drop.

Orange Experiments

My history with orange peel is a bit more interesting. For my original vermouth, I simply cooked the whole peel of one orange with the wine and other herbs (I also used some lemon peel.) Next I tried steeping fresh orange peel without any pith in brandy in addition to a second peel with pith in the wine. This went on in various permutations until batch #6, when I went in a new direction after aquiring some fresh seville oranges. I juiced the oranges, and the chopped up the remains, pulp and all, and soaked them in Grave's for a week (this time, it was actually Grave's 151, it was before I found a steady source for the 190.) The result was really nice. It had plenty of bitter orangy flavor from the peel, and some nice sourness from the juice that was still in the pulp. This concoction served me well for the next 8 batches of vermouth, but it eventually ran out.

Fresh seville oranges are hard to come by, and I am now making things in addition to vermouth that require bitter orange flavors. At the moment, I am using both bitter and sweet dried orange peel from Penn Herb. The bitter tastes very similar to the seville oranges, the sweet appears to be from some sort of navel type.

Orange Peel Tincture Methodology

One thing that I noticed when steeping dried peels in 190 proof alcohol is that they do not rehydrate at all. They stay quite hard even after soaking for a month. I tried a side by side comparison between orange peel soaked in Grave's 190 straight, and in Grave's diluted to about 125 proof. The peel in the lower proof softened and expanded, and the liquid turned a much darker orange color. I tasted them by putting a few drops of each in water. It was hard to tell the difference, but I think the 190 had a stronger flavor. I decided that the full strength alcohol was probably extracting something that the diluted version could not, but I still wanted the nice color. So here is the method that I have settled on:

• combine 200 grams dried orange peel with 1 liter Grave's 190 in a jar
• Let steep for 3 weeks, shaking once or twice a day.
• Dilute to 120 proof and steep for an additional week.
• Strain, filter, and bottle.