I hope this helps. I watched a lot of YouTube videos from “Cocktail Time with Kevin Kos” as well as “Truffles on the Rocks” and learned a bunch from them. Good luck!

It’s a bit complicated to explain, but you can google how to concentrate juices by freezing. It’s easy, but time consuming. As I stated in the post, I started with six cups of squeezed juice, and ended up with a little less than six ounces of concentrate. I added the concentrate to the liqueur jar.

After everything is mixed in, give it a taste to see if you want it sweeter, or if you need to add more water. Now you can scoop the liqueur with a metal ladle into the storage jars. One option to hive it even more flavor is to squeeze all the juices from the mandarin oranges, and concentrate them.

Pour the contents of the jar containing all the peels/mint/Everclear through a fine strainer and into a clean large pan. If you have cheese cloth, you can fold it in half and put on top of the strainer double up the filtering. Once liquids are in the pan, add simple syrup and mix with a metal spoon.

Once the time is up, get another two jars ready and sterilized, make simple syrup (1:1 ratio of sugar and water) in however amount you want. I made this liqueur ~100 proof, basically doubling the volume of the original jar. If you don’t want it that strong, you can dilute it with more simple syrup.

Seal the jar, give it a gentle shake or swirl, then leave it in a cool dark area to steep for two to three weeks. Every other day give the jar another gentle shake. This is optional, but I recommend adding a tablespoon of ascorbic acid (vitamin C) to help preserve the color of the liqueur.

You gotta do all that you can to eliminate contamination, because alcohol doesn’t kill everything, specially fungus. The mints should help a bit with their anti-fungal properties. Pour as much Everclear as you want or can git in the jar (I think I poured one and a half bottles of Everclear.

Thank you! Sorry, I haven’t been using Bluesky much lately. I think I used some 12-15 organic mandarin oranges, and a bunch of spearmint. I thoroughly washed and peeled the mandarin oranges, shaved off the white pith from the peels, washed the mints, and added them all into a sterilized jar.

Visible light photo captured with a Nikon Z8 and Z 24-120/4 S. Thermal camera is the Flir E6 Pro.

For the comparison the top crops are from the Plena, the bottom from the 135/2 DC.

#barkriverknives #knifephotography
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The reason I had to shoot so much was because the knife kept twisting around, and creating all sorts of cool and colorful reflections. The magnets in my lights also helped influence the knife’s twisting motion. Knife is a Bark River Puukko 3V.

Happy new year to you as well! Yes, gotta diversify my social apps. Meta sometimes can be a pain…

The alcohol I used was Everclear, 1.5L worth. Adding 1L of simple syrup, in addition to the juices from the blueberries, I think the ABV should be in the 50% or slightly higher.