An original.

I saw a gin advertised the other day, Kala Gin, that had amongst its ingredients, kumquat, cacao, and hops. And I thought to myself, “I can do that with the kumquat gin I made a couple of months ago.”

I had infused gin with various fruits, mostly for something to do while we have been otherwise restricted doing normal shit. Like traveling. That’s probably my biggest passion in my retirement.

One of the gins I have infused was with kumquat. At the time, I was just experimenting with infusing different fruits into either gin, or vodka. I wasn’t sure what I was really going to do with it all. But it was a creative outlet, of sorts.

So, as I said, I saw this gin for sale. And having recently started to play around with an iSi whip as well, I thought I would experiment. I looked at recipes that infused gin with cacao, Dave Arnold talks about that one in his book, Liquid Intelligence. And I also looked at recipes for infusing hops with vodka.

First, I calculated how much would be about half for each. Added that to the whip and added the already infused gin. I gave that a taste, and then thought it probably needed more pronounced flavours of both the hops, and the cacao, to balance out the kumquat. I then infused more hops and cacao. This time I thought it tasted pretty good. Balanced with the sweet of the fruit, tart at the same time. The bitter of the hops complimented the chocolate fragrance as well.

So tonight, you see the result. With my garnish that I was told looked somewhat inappropriate.

60ml infused Gin
30ml Lemon Juice
15ml Simple Syrup
I shook with ice and served in a chilled coupe, with ice.

As you can possibly see from the background. I didn’t really need to chill the drink once I sat it on the window ledge.