A different style of" drink

Sometime when your messing around with food & drink you think why hasn't anyone ever done that before or if they had I've never heard of it being done ?   You search for recipes and don't find any ..is there a problem with it  Houston  ?


As a result , last year 2015 on New years day I put 24 fresh cut bay leaves into a clip over stoppered bottle and add half a pint of vodka plus two dessert spoons of white granulated sugar, gave it a vigorous shake then clipped it down & put it in our high pressure canned goods cupboard.

 I'd heard of & as a kid seen old Italian & Sicilian men having Bay Rum rubbed in their scalps after a hair cut at the old fashioned barbershop we went to , but I've never heard of the vodka slant with sugar .


 Every first of the month I  inverted the bottle to agitate the sugar then stood it back in the store cupboard in the dark , after a few months it had dissolved in to the vodka. I still carried on doing the inverting so as to get maximum flavours out of the leaves

.
 Today almost 19 months to the day later  has been sampling day .

Colour wise it is a lovely dark amber tea colour , almost a sparkling one , no sign of clouding or a haze.
wheilst at the hair dressers
 Then the tasting test .
 Verdict ...
Neat it is a strong slightly bitter but not unappetizing taste .

Putting half  an inch of in a 250 ml tumbler & topping it up to with an inch of the top with ice cold diet coke  has made a very very acceptable herbal taste . The aroma is quite pleasant too ...to me it's a sort of vanilla cum cinnamon scent .

The next  bottle is going to be a full 40 ounce'r or bigger .

Nineteen months is a long time to wait for a drink, maybe 19 mins.

We do kinda the same thing with lemon peelings to basicly the same end but an added twist so to speak   When we strain out the peels we put them to dry is suger which makes wonderful lemon rind candy and a great drink garnish.
http://cappyandpegody.blogspot.com/2013/04/lemon-shine-revisited.html

I've heard of doing that with candy, specifically Jolly Ranchers. Gives the vodka a cool color too, lol!

I do something similar with elderberries. Berries stay in for about 8 months and then the booze ages another year or more. Good for the respiratory system.

Elderberries sound more delicious than bay leaves! But what you have done plantoid I have zero experience with. Aged fresh bay leaves in spirits? Nope, but I am game!