Strawberry Moonshine Recipe: Unleashing the Panty-Dropper Potion

How’s it going, chasers? I hope you’re having a kick-ass week. Today, we’re messing with strawberries. Yes, I know, I’m horrible. I’m using frozen strawberries. That’s what I’ve got available at the moment.

We’re making strawberry liqueur, or if you want to go by the naming convention on the home distilling forums, strawberry panty dropper. We’ll get into that soon. Welcome to Still. I’m Jesse, and this is the channel all about chasing the craft of home distillation and making it a legitimate hobby.

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Alright, guys, so yeah, we’re making a strawberry infusion. We’re going to make something quite delicious today. Like I said, strawberry liqueur if you want to be posh about it, or if you’re a crude, rude, horrible person, you may want to call it strawberry panty-dropper.

Obviously, it’s named because it’s going to slide down very easily. The drink I’m talking about is very easy to drink, and it still kicks like a mule. Personally, I think the idea of guys and girls drinks is kind of ridiculous because my wife’s favorite drink is Laphroaig, as you guys, I’m sure, know by now.

And my dad, Wildman, who is still a whole lot tougher than I ever will be, tough old bugger, and about as far down the whisky road he goes is Southern Comfort or Drambuie because anything after that isn’t sweet enough for him.

There’s a bunch of these recipes kicking around, some slight subtle variations on these things on forums all over the place. But the idea is basically fruit, normally some sort of berry, peaches, and things like that as well are used often enough, relatively high ABV spirit, and a fairly large amount of sugar.

Now we’re going to change things a little bit, so it’s going to be a little bit different than a lot of other recipes around. That’s fine. Some use brandy, some use vodka, some of them use American moonshine, corn whiskey essentially. What we’ve got here is white corn whiskey.

This is the stuff I just made on the junior still, and it’s actually basically a polenta whiskey, essentially bourbon, a bourbon-style mash bill, but with the cracked corn subbed out for polenta because that’s what I could get my hands on.

The reason why that with strawberries is interesting enough. The polenta is a little more savory than corn normally is, a little bit more grainy, almost flowery in some ways, but it also has quite a heavy oiliness to it. It’s not oily, horrible, really buttery almost, and it reminded me of pie crust in some strange way.

So I thought, why not? Let’s mess with this and see if we can’t make something kind of like a strawberry tart or a strawberry pie, I guess you’d call it. Let’s give it a whirl, right? Let’s see what happens.

Alright, team, it’s a pretty simple process. Like I said, all you need is the high ABV liquor, whatever you decide you want to use, what you think might pair well with the fruit or berry you’re going to use, the berries themselves, and then some sugar as well.

So if you want to switch it up and do something different, by all means, do. If you want to try and follow along with something just like this, that’s cool too. I’m using a two-to-one ratio of spirits to strawberries, specifically two liters of my polenta whiskey at 65% to one kilogram of strawberries.

So this part is done and dusted, super easy. All we’re going to do is keep this around for about a week, give or take a few days, give it a little shake every now and again, and agitate it up, maybe give it a stir. It seems to be just looking for the berries to lose the color and for everything to be extracted out into that high ABV liquid.

So we’ve given the berries a week, and as you can see, the color’s pretty much gone out of them, and the color of the alcohol is absolutely amazing. So what we need to do now is strain this. Now we’re actually not going to get rid of the berries yet.

We’re going to get a little bit more out of these guys, but we do want to separate them at this point in time. I just realized that I’m terrified of tipping that, so let me get a spoon first, and we’ll spoon something out to make some room, and then I can tip it.

Next, we need to separate the berries from the liquid, and I’m not going to worry about squeezing them hard out or doing that overly efficiently because we’re not getting rid of those yet. Every freaking time I do this, I forget that this is a small mouth, and I need to get the stuff back out again and end up doing the stupid dance, you know, inching it back out. But anyway, one of these days, I’ll learn.

So what we’re going to do with these berries now is pop them back into a separate container. I need to make sure to wash this. That’s better. And we’re actually going to add the juice of half a lemon into this as well. I’m just going to make sure I don’t get any seeds in there.

This is to help preserve the color, and honestly, guys, look at that. How awesome is that? We want to preserve that color for sure.

Alright, I’m going to pop this back into the smaller jar simply because I need to think up there much room. So that can go aside for now, and we need to work on these berries. What we’re actually going to do is add a well, a shit-ton of sugar in there. This is the best way to describe it. Yeah, you would think I would have the right tools for this out here by now, wouldn’t you? But no.

As you can tell, guys, I’m not being overly exact with this. I just wanted to cover them fairly well in sugar, and the idea is that we are going to let this sit. We’re going to give it a shake every now and again, and like two or three days, and essentially that sugar is going to draw out all the moisture and the berries, extract some more, a little bit more color, but mostly flavor for us.

But in doing so, it’s going to create the perfect thing to sweeten this over here. And obviously, because this is called, you know, panty-dropper in the forums, it’s going to be sweet and easy to drink, right? It’s going to be really sweet.

Use it for over ice cream, for salad dressings, for marinades, whatever the same, no, he wants. Let’s come back in a few days and see what this is looking like.

So we’ve given this four days. For the most part, the sugar is dissolved. It’s turned into a syrup. There is still some sugar around. Cool, it smells good. But what I need to do right now is I’m just going to tip the syrup out. I’m just gonna add a little bit more sugar back into the berries as well.

I don’t know, to be honest, if we’re going to get too much more moisture coming out of them, but I mean, why not, right? We’ll give it a go. I may not need that syrup for the actual beverage, but I can get some wear out of it. Like I said earlier, we can use it on ice cream or, you know, for all sorts of other different things. It would be a waste to waste it.

Alright, so we can put that aside for another couple of days now, in case we need it or not. So the plan now, guys, is for me to basically start playing with ratios between the spirit itself, the syrup, proofing it down with, you know, water, and whether or not I want to add anything else into the stuff, sort of get a flavor profile that I enjoy, that I like.

My tools of choice to get that job done are a ten milliliter syringe, a one milliliter syringe, whoops, and a Glencairn. Now, honestly, this glass is probably not ideal for this, but it’s what I’ve got.

So I’ve got the spirit, I’ve got the water, got the tools, and I’ve got the syrup, and a couple of other things here that I may end up using. We’ll talk about those when we get to them. So now, any place is as good as any other, I think. So I’m gonna start roughly with the sort of ratios that I’m probably gonna have available to me to make a full batch of this if I want.

So that is going to be three parts of the spirit, two parts of water, and one part of the syrup. I’m probably aiming for somewhere around 25, 30 percent. I’m guessing is where I’m gonna want to land with that. So obviously, with all the sugar going in here, it’s pretty, that’s, it’s, I’m not gonna be able to measure it, so it’s gonna be a bit of a guesstimate.

But let’s start with that and see where we end up. So I’m going to go with 6 milliliters of the spirit, 4 milliliters of water, and 2 milliliters of the syrup. And let’s see where that gets us. Alright, so first impressions, it’s a little bit hot, and it’s a little bit sweet. So I’m going to add a little bit more water and a little bit more spirit.

Karl S

Lead marketer, brewer, dad, and husband. Pretty much an all-round awesome guy. I’ve been homebrewing for +20 yrs, an aspiring pro-brewer and micro brewery owner!