Your intrepid liquor reporter was thumbing through his page-a-day calendar last week, and realized in the nick of time that October 16 was National Liqueur Day, which meant a day of sugary boozing was in order.
Curious readers may wonder just what the difference is between a liquor and a liqueur. Well gentle reader, you’re about to find out.
Liquor is a generic word that refers to any type of alcoholic beverage, but is most commonly used to describe distilled spirits like vodka, rum, or whiskey. Technically, beer and wine could also be called liquor, but this usage is fairly uncommon.
To be called a liqueur, it must be an alcoholic beverage that has been both sweetened and flavored. This leads us to a few edge cases – for example, gin is flavored with juniper berries, but it is not sweetened, so we cannot call gin a liqueur.
The concept of sweetened liqueurs dates back thousands of years, older than most of the liquors that are used as the base spirit for liqueurs. The earliest example is mead, a honey-based fermented beverage popular in Ancient Greece. The Irish got into the act back in the 16th century, when they started flavoring their whisky with heather and clover honey.
The world’s most popular liqueur is the crowd-pleasing Baileys Irish Cream. Invented in 1974, it marked a breakthrough in combining Irish Whisky with dairy cream without the two separating in the bottle.
Baileys is made from a combination of pure Irish cream, produced from 40,000 faithful Irish cows, and aged Irish whiskey, two products which are normally not compatible. However, the Baileys folks have a top secret process that actually uses the alcohol in the whiskey to preserve the cream, a method which, naturally, they aren’t sharing with the public! Baileys is wonderful in an Irish coffee, but also tastes splendid over ice (as you’ve seen in those sexy Baileys commercials), but my favorite is to splash it over vanilla ice cream on a hot summer day – yummy!
The world of liqueurs is not limited to just cream liqueurs – heavens no. We have coffee-flavored liqueurs like Kahlua and Tia Maria, anise-flavored liqueurs like Sambuca and Ouzo, fruit-flavored liqueurs like Southern Comfort and Grand Marnier, nut-flavored liqueurs like Amaretto and Frangelico, and herb-flavored liqueurs like Vermouth and Drambuie. I could go on all day, but I would run out of space on the page long before I ran out of liqueurs.
The one thing that all these liqueurs have in common is that they are have very sweet and intense flavors, which helps explain their popularity as after-dinner drinks, or as mixers with coffee or other types of alcohol. There are even a few fine chefs that take advantage of the intense flavors to cook with liqueurs, imparting the rich qualities into sauces and seasonings of many dishes.
Many liqueurs are mean to be enjoyed neat (ie no mixers). Sambuca is the example that immediately comes to mind – who among us hasn’t bellied up to the bar and ordered a round of flaming Sambuca shooters?
An obvious exception to this no-mixing guideline is Vermouth. From the German word vermut, which you may also recognize as wormwood, first rose to infamy as the principal flavoring agent of Absinthe. Luckily for all the martini fans out there, Vermouth does not share the nasty reputation of its green cousin.
Vermouth starts its life as an aromatized wine, then is infused with macerated herbs and spices for flavoring. Finally, a grape-based distillate is added to increase the alcohol content, and presto – you’ve got the perfect martini mixer! Add some gin and throw in an olive, and you’re suddenly as suave as James Bond, or as sexy as Carrie and Samantha.
Strangely enough, Vermouth languished as a boring medicinal potion through the middle ages, used as a digestive aid or a healthy alternative to the plague-ridden waters of Europe. It wasn’t until the early 1800’s that the style of dry Vermouth that we’re most accustomed to was first produced. This new style took the cocktail world by storm, and we’ve been enjoying it ever since.
While drinking culture in Spain has people sipping Vermouth straight from a glass, North American boozers generally only have Vermouth as a mixer with Gin or other spirit. Whatever your preference, there is a liqueur for you!
