If you like Pina Coladas! - Spiced Falernum

Flavour Notes

On the nose, you can smell lots of spices and with each sip you get a bitter sweet flavour and lots of freshness. There is a prominent flavour of clove and ginger on the palate.

Inspiration

A spiced falernum is a syrup liqueur from the Caribbean that often sees an appearance in tiki style cocktails. It is rum based and contains lots of spices and citrus peels.

Our Beverage Head Rahul Raghav first tasted this at a Tiki Bar in Singapore and realised how it completely elevated a fruity cocktail. Tiki Style cocktails are quite popular in bartending culture. While spiced falernum isn’t available in Indian markets to buy, he decided to try his hand at making it. This was in fact during the same time when he was gearing up for cocktail trials for O Pedro’s opening cocktail menu where we knew that we wanted lots of tropical & fresh cocktails.

What’s also great about making an in house falernum is that you are able to repurpose lemon and orange peels after extracting the juice that also encourages sustainable and cost effective bartending.

Process

• Infuse a mix of 450 ml white rum and 300 ml dark rum in a mason jar with the following
  - Lime peel - 6 nos.
  - Orange peel - 2 nos.
  - Sweet lime peel - 2 nos.
  - Ginger slices - 25 gms Cloves
  - 25 nos Caster Sugar
  - 50 gms
• Leave this jar at room temperature for 3 months. Refrain from keeping this in the fridge as the infusion process is much slower.
• You will know it is done when you have achieved the flavour you are looking for in your falernum. The flavour of the spices and peels comes through giving it a pleasant bitterness.
• Strain this and reserve the liquid.
  
  This is your house made falernum. Great job! Add a few dashes of this in your cocktail
  
  

  Note : Do not reuse the spices or citrus peels for your next batch as it will make the mix extremely bitter. Once you have strained it, you can use it for however long you like as it does not spoil.

The Bombay Canteen uses this for

Rajab Mahal , a cocktail from the first Art Deco Canteen Cocktail Book

You can use this for

Whisky Sours & Tiki Cocktails