Mandarin Orange Thyme Gin and Five Spice Rum

Chinese New Year is pretty much the most important day of the year to me. Besides the copious amounts of food, alcohol and general tomfoolery that I get up to each year, it’s also a great chance to reconnect with my (admittedly small) family. There’s only a few of us, but we hardly have time for each other on a regular day. Chinese New Year is a rare chance for us to sit down, have a nice meal and just talk. I cherish every moment of it.

Of course, there’s no point talking about ushering in the Chinese Year of the Goat without incorporating the traditional mandarin orange. While we give them out in duos to pretty much everyone who we consider friends and family, there’s still something about them that’s distinctively festive.

I’ll admit it, this set of infusions has been brewing for a while. The idea popped into my head when I was wondering what a good way to change things up this year would be. So, instead of the usual beer and wine, I made not one, but two liqueur infusions as a kind of experiment. Why? I couldn’t decide which base spirit I wanted to use this time. So, an experiment was born. Why make choices when you can just do both!

To change things up a bit, I decided to go with gin and rum instead of bourbon and vodka. Because of the differences in the base spirit, I thought quite a bit about the tastes that would go well with each. Gin often contains herbs and other botanicals that are already infused as part of its production. I decided that it would go better with herbs. With the sweet taste of oranges however, I also wanted to add in a bit of earthy, spicy flavour that would balance it out. This isn’t a secret to chefs around the world: duck with oranges and thyme is a classic.

I used Bombay Sapphire as the base. It’s a pretty well-balanced gin with no overly strong flavours that might confuse the whole thing.

Mandarin Orange Thyme Gin
One 700ml bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin
Peel from 8 mandarin oranges
5 sprigs of thyme
Combine all the ingredients in a large mason jar and swirl. Leave to infuse for 3 weeks, then add 150ml of simple white sugar syrup (more or less to taste) and let it infuse for another 2 weeks. Filter and bottle afterwards.

For the other experiment, I wanted to go back to my roots. Being of Cantonese Chinese descent, I grew up eating roast pork, duck and goose, all of which contain some measure of five-spice powder. Composed of a variety of spices, which are usually fennel, cinnamon, star anise, ginger root, and ground cloves, five- spice powder has a very strong fragrance and elements of sourness, sweetness, bitterness and savouriness that are well-balanced with each other.

I thought that it would go well with the natural sweetness and bold flavour of sugarcane-based alcohol such as rum. I used white rum, which is not wood-aged, to avoid overwhelming the final infusion with complexity. I also added in a bit of vanilla, cloves and cinnamon to give it an extra punch.

Mandarin Orange Five Spice Rum
One 700ml bottle of Bacardi white rum
Peel from 8 mandarin oranges
3 teaspoons five spice powder
1 cinnamon stick
1 vanilla pod
A pinch of cloves
Combine all the ingredients in a large mason jar and swirl. Leave to infuse for 3 weeks, then add 150ml of simple brown sugar syrup (more or less to taste) and let it infuse for another 2 weeks. Filter and bottle afterwards.

Observant readers will see that I made one mistake in the jars above: there’s still some white pith on a few strips of the peel that I missed out on in the thyme infusion. It would have been better to remove them completely. I also went easy on the syrup this time; the limoncello I made earlier was a mite too sweet.

The waiting was the hardest part, as usual, but I finally bottled my infusions today, just in time for Chinese New Year.

You can see the marked colour change over the 5 weeks that they’ve been infusing. The gin is lighter as the base ingredients are lighter and I used white sugar syrup, whereas the rum is darker because of the ingredients and the brown sugar syrup.

The mandarin orange thyme gin turned out quite well. It had the strong orange flavour I was hoping for, with the earthiness of thyme infused quite well. In fact, it had an unexpected, but not unpleasant, “hot” taste akin to a mild hot chilli sauce that definitely woke me up. There’s a slight bitter aftertaste from the mistake with the pith I made earlier, which serves as a good reminder to mind the details. Overall, I’m quite pleased and will be looking for some cocktails to mix up using this.

The infused rum definitely had a strong fragrance of orange and spice, which suits me just fine. The rum itself was a little downplayed in the final product- I would cut back slightly on the spices next time to allow the rum to come into its own. I am still really pleased with the result. The orange and the five spice combine very well and the scent is as intoxicating as the liqueur itself. It also has a nice Chinese feel that balances my otherwise Western or Caribbean collection.