PEACH LIQUEUR

Peach Liqueur Recipe

4 cups sugar

4 cup water

8 pounds fresh peaches, stemmed and washed

6 cups 100-proof vodka

4 cup brandy

4 teaspoons lemon zest

4 teaspoons orange zest

Bring the sugar and water to boil over a medium-high heat. Stir constantly to prevent scorching. When you’re done the liquid should be clear. You’ve just made something called simple syrup. This is used as a base in many liqueur recipes. Put this aside and let it cool until it’s just warm.

Cut the peaches in half and remove the pits. (Don’t throw those pits away though! They’re going to go into the liqueur.) Slice the peaches. Put everything into a 2-gallon container that has a tight-fitting lid. Give it a good stir and then cover.

Put it in a cool dark place for two weeks. Give it a good shake once in awhile during the two weeks so that things don’t clump together.

After two weeks use a fine-mesh strainer to get the solids (including the pits) out. Discard the solids. Transfer the liquid into a clean container. Cover and let stand for another 2 or 3 weeks.

Rack or filter the liqueur into its final container. (We’re going to use clean wine bottles.) You should get about one gallon of liqueur.

You can see the solids. They’re sitting in a strainer that we have dripping into a food-grade plastic bucket. We ended up letting the peach solids drip into the bucket for about an hour and a half . We were able to capture almost two cups more of peach liqueur during that time. So we now have a little over a gallon of liqueur aging in the wine closet. In two or three weeks we’ll siphon it into wine bottles.

The Man of the House and I sneaked a taste of the peach liqueur before we put it into the wine closet. It was very nice. I was concerned that the vodka and brandy would overpower the peach taste. That’s not the case at all. It is very light tasting and very peachy!

The other day we bottled our peach liqueur. We’d kept in in the wine closet for about three weeks after straining out the solids. We stored it in a big glass bottle and were surprised by the amount of solids that settled in the bottom. It’s a little hard to see in the below photo so I’ve added an arrow to show just how much sediment there was.

The cherry liqueur we made earlier in the year had almost no sediment so this was an interesting development.

The Man of the House siphoned the liqueur into a bottling bucket. From there it went into five wine bottles. Because of the extreme amount of sediment we didn’t quite get that fifth bottle filled.

I’m quite pleased with the flavor. The liqueur is very smooth and tastes primarily of peaches. There’s little to no alcohol taste. It’s very light and very, very good.