¡No Patxaran!

Patxaran or Pacharán is a Basque liqueur that I discovered in Spain a few years ago. I had it first in Gijón or maybe in La Coruña outside the País Vasco and later tried some in Bilbao and San Sebastián, where I also bought a bottle to bring home. The ingredients are simple: it's anise liqueur infused with "endrinas" which are apparently sloe berries. There's also a bit of coffee bean and, according to this pretty detailed Wikipedia article, vanilla. It's often home-made or at least regionally produced (the bottle I brought home was made by the store where I bought it). People drink it on the rocks and it's a wonderful lazy summer afternoon drink when you want to sit in an outdoor bar watching people go by.

I made my own bottle—after a fashion—this summer and it was a passable success, though I don't know that I would serve it to a Spaniard!

It came about because Jessica had a bunch of different currants from our garden. We'd already made some jelly, some very good crème de cassis and some pretty but fairly inedible spiked red currants and were trying to think of something new. Then I remembered a bottle of Cristal aguardiente from Colombia that someone had left after a party at our house. When I finally got around to sampling it I was surprised to find that it was anise-flavored (aguardiente is usually unflavored unless otherwise labeled; not so in Colombia it turns out). I dedided to make a variation on patxaran, replacing the "endrinas" with a mixture of black and red currants and gooseberries. I steeped the currants in the aguardiente for a few weeks and also threw in a a teaspoon of coffee grounds. That turned out to be a mistake as it was a bit too much and it was really hard to filter out effectively. Next time I'll just throw in a couple of whole coffee beans.


I filtered it a few times and bottled it in the unattractive Cristal bottle (it says something about how rushed and between-other-projects this was that I didin't even remove the label). As I said, I wouldn't enter it into a competition but it turned out all right, just a little tart and with the coffee undertone a little too pronounced. Since it's not made with sloe berries I decided to call it ¡No Patxaran!

I'm sorry about not having taken photos of process but this blog can't be a high priority project, and there's a limit to my wife's tolerance of this kind of time-frittering:
[cartoon by Virgil Partch, from Bottle Fatigue] Read more!