A Cheeky Infusion Or Two?


Alcohol Infusions"Here's to alcohol, the rose coloured glasses of life." ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald 

One of the maiden voyages of the Circa Covid think tank is the launch of our ethical hampers and more specifically what to put in them? We have put a big emphasis on having a homemade element to our hampers. Booze is no different and seems as a good a place to start as any.

We have been making ‘house infusions’ for a few years now, and hope that we have got pretty good at it. It’s not all that complicated really, we take a good quality base spirit we want to infuse, and cram it full of what we want to infuse it with, then let time do its thing. We focus on seasonality as much as possible. Foraged sea herbs are always a favourite, Beth’s mums blackberries in the autumn, Spruce from Ashclyst forest, you get the picture…

Most recently, we have made our own house vermouth. We wanted to keep it simple for our first outing. Our virgin recipe included four commonly used botanicals made into tinctures (cassia bark, yarrow root, gentian root and wormwood) and four of our own we have foraged locally. We decided on rock samphire, sea beets, sea purslane and pine. It’s bloody tasty. We will be adding sloe berries & thyme into the mix in the next batch.

Now there is the risk of gecng a bit pretentious and irritating when discussing cocktails. We will attempt to avoid this, as such we have given our mixologists the day off. Anyway, we have always tried to be creative and seasonal with our cocktails. There are some restrictions when designing cocktails for hampers. They need to be booze-heavy, so as to travel gracefully. Definitely a first world problem. Our focus with hampers has been on coming up with quirky alternatives to classics. Think toasted hazelnut negroni, sea herb martini, hay infused old fashioned and all that jazz.

We will be posting some recipes on here over the coming weeks for you to get infusing, mixing and drinking at home.

I hope you have found this interesting, and that it has inspired you to consider buying one of our ethical hampers for a loved one this year. You can find the full range on our website www.circadevon.co.uk