How to clarify a cloudy home-made liqueur

When making home made amaros and liqueurs, you often end up with a cloudy product. As I explain in my Montenegro-style damson amaro recipe, the essential oils in the citrus peels are the likely culprits, forming an emulsion when the water (in the sugar syrup) is added. This happens famously when adding water to Ouzo and other anise-flavoured drinks and so is called the “Ouzo effect” or louche effect.

There’s lots of advice on the web. In this post I’ll review a couple of commonly recommended options for clarification (originally called “fining” in wine-making: introducing a material that binds to unwanted particles causing them to aggregate and settle out). Spoiler alert: the first isn’t that effective; the second is but is very slow. My suggestion for an easy life is to live with the cloudiness. It doesn’t affect the taste at all. However, if a sparkling clear appearance is what you’re after, read on.

Using pectolase

Pectin, the compound in the cell walls of fruits that’s a natural gelling agent (and the thing that makes your jams set), was isolated in 1825 by French pharmacist and botanist Henri Braconnot. In the early 20th century, it was found that moulds like Penicillium could break down pectin, and eventually the key enzymes were found and isolated. Nowadays what’s sold as pectolase is actually a mixture of compounds that break down pectin. It is often the pectin in fruit that causes cloudiness in alcoholic infusions, and breaking it down is one way to clarify them. If you’ve ever wondered how you get clear, golden apple juice from the naturally cloudy initial product – that’s pectolase followed by filtration.

Instructions for around 1 litre of liqueur to be clarified:

1. Dissolve ¼ tsp of pectolase in 2 tbsp water and mix. If you have a different amount of liquid adjust accordingly, the pectolase instructions say 1 tsp of pectolase dissolved in ½ liquid per gallon to be clarified.
2. Add the pectolase mixture to the liqueur
3. Leave for around 3 days. You should see a powdery looking sediment that has formed and, although not crystal clear, the liqueur should look brighter
4. Carefully pour off the liqueur from the top and filter. Leave the last 2cm or so of liquid and discard, but just keep an eye to not bring across the sediment. An alternative would be to use a siphon, as below.

As I said earlier, this kind of works, but I still had some cloudiness in the end result.

Using bentonite clay

Bentonite is a clay named after Fort Benton in Wyoming, formed from the slow weathering of volcanic ash. It’s strange ability to swell was noticed at the turn of the century, and it wasn’t long before winemakers in Europe were using it to remove haze from wines. It contains the mineral montmorillonite, and that’s the magic ingredient that binds to proteins and haze-forming compounds, allowing them to precipitate out leaving a clearer liquid behind. When you buy food-grade bentonite, it is safe, even if you end up accidentally consuming a little, but I don’t think you’d want too much!

Once you’ve siphoned off the clear liquid, many articles advise filtering the remaining sediment so as not to waste it – there’s more liquid in there. However, this is easier said than done. The particles are something like 5-50 µm. A regular paper coffee filter has a pore size of 15–25 µm, and a fine cheesecloth or muslin will be 100–200 µm. A gold coffee filter has no effect at all, it all passes straight through. We need something much finer to catch it all. I used some “very slow filtering” lab-grade filter paper, that has 1-2 µm particle retention.

The recipe below has been assembled by comparing a number of sources. The guide to “fining” from the Making, Waiting, Tasting blog is great and as ever r/Amaro on Reddit has lots of discussion – here’s the Guide to Clarification.

How does it look?