One day a couple weeks back, it was, as Singaporeans might expect, raining cows and chickens. Being cooped up at home on a rainy day wasn’t exactly my idea of having a fun time, so I decided that it was finally time to get cracking on a new recipe that I came across.Nothing like a nice pie and a bourbon to warm you up in bad weather, whether rain or snow. I decided that to save time, I would merge the two together and make a bourbon that reminded me of pie.
Some of our friends in America turn to an interesting drink in the holiday season: Apple Cinnamon Bourbon. While not exactly traditional, the drink brings to mind a nice festive Christmas or Thanksgiving. Coincidentally (or not), it is almost Christmas now as I write this. With the right ingredients, anyone can make it.
I have previously experimented with infusions before. While Limoncello was relatively time consuming, this was actually relatively easy, and the ingredients weren’t very hard to find. I decided to keep most of the ingredients used American in origin to stay in theme.
I used:
- 5 Washington Red Delicious Apples
- A Cinnamon Stick
- A Vanilla Bean
- Jim Beam White Label Whiskey
You can substitute the apples and whiskey for other varieties, but I liked the sweetness of the Red Delicious apples in particular. It also has slightly bitter skin, which helps to balance the sweet tastes of the whiskey and apples. The official apple of Washington state, it makes up about 60% of all the apples grown in the US. It is easy to find even in Singapore; I got mine at the local Fairprice supermarket. As they were not organic, I made sure to scrub the skin very thoroughly to remove the wax and pesticides that are commonly used in modern agriculture.
As for the other ingredients, obtaining Cinnamon was easy, but getting my hands on vanilla was somewhat more difficult; cinnamon is widely available, but I only managed to get vanilla in the baking section of Fairprice Finest. If you have issues acquiring the vanilla, you might want to skip it; it adds another layer of fragrance but is not absolutely necessary.
Lastly, I chose Jim Beam for two reasons. Firstly, it has vanilla sweet notes in the nose and tastes of oak, vanilla and spice, which go well with the other ingredients in the recipe. Secondly, it was really affordable – all of $45 bucks for a 700ml bottle. Perfect.
1. Slice the apples into wedges and put them in a mason jar.
2. Extract the vanilla seeds and put them in the jar.
3. Put in the cinnamon stick.
4. Add the entire bottle of bourbon.
5. Seal and let steep for 4 weeks.
I tasted the infusion at 4 weeks and found that it needed a bit of sweetening. I added about 50ml of homemade simple syrup (simply dissolve sugar into boiling water) to sweeten it slightly, and let it sit for another week. After that, I filtered the newly-made apple cinnamon bourbon through a simple sieve and sealed it in a bottle.
The apple cinnamon bourbon is now ready to serve, a nice aperitif to go down with a nice Christmas dinner. The sweetness of apples, the fragrance of spice and the oaky tastes of bourbon will go down well with the turkey, ham and cake of a festive meal. I shall be enjoying every last drop!
