#I need to finish my bottle of lime rum and make some rum port tea

[zigraves]

About your recipe with the curdled milk and the brandy - there is not quite enough detail there for me to feel comfortable attempting to replicate. Can I ask you to make a step by step?

Sure! Here is a step by step that breaks the original 4 steps into quite a lot more than 4 steps, hopefully with adequate detail about each step and why you do it the way that you do. This is a LONG post, so it’s hopefully buried under this readmore.

Equipment you need: A measuring cup, ideally a set that also includes 1/4 cups and 1/2 cups, but it’s fine to just use one cup and go by eye. A peeling knife or grater (for zesting your fruit) A pan capable of holding at least 4 cups of liquid A large lidded jug that fits in your fridge A spoon with a long handle A second large jug for straining your mix into, lid not required A large glass bottle, at least 1 litre capacity, with flip or screw top, for final storage of your fancy drink. This should be sterilised ahead of time, ie in dishwasher or oven. A seive or similar strainer A funnel for convenience Coffee filters, several

The method I use is based off Mary Rockett’s Citrus Milk Punch over on splendid table, and with the same ingredients. Keep to a 1:5 ratio of milk:cocktail for the best results, but you can get away with 1:4 in a pinch. I treat cups as British cooking cups, ie around 250ml capacity. As long as you use the same measuring cups throughout, you’ll be fine: 1- Peel your lemon & orange into long strips of zest. I use one large naval orange and two whole lemons worth of zest because I like it extra flavoursome. If you have more time and also motor control, take a microplane grater and zest all the colour off your fruit. You want the zest to be able to give out all the oils & flavours it contains, hence optional use of a grater. You DO NOT WANT the pith, the white stuff under the tasty zesty peel. Leave that on the fruit, and save the fruit for later by wrapping it in clingfilm to replace to the outer skin it lost.

2 - Dump the zest/ strips into a tupperware containing two cups of your cheapest brandy. I use the bottom shelf stuff that comes in plastic bottles. Try to make sure it’s a good waterproof tupperware, because then you can pick it up and give it a violent shake to encourage the delicious oils from the zest to really infuse into the brandy.

3 - Put your tupperware container somewhere away from direct sunlight (I hide mine on top of the microwave), and come back 24 hours later.

4 - It’s now 24 hours later. Pour a cup of milk from the fridge into a LARGE and LIDDED container, like a 2 litre jug. The milk will sit in the jug warming up to a cool room temperature while you do the next bits.

5 - The official recipe says to add your remaining ingredients together and whisk till the sugar dissolves, but this is where I diverge a bit. Add your 2 cups of water and 1/2 cup of sugar together in a pan, and heat gently while stirring until the sugar dissolves. I find this faster and easier on my wrists than trying to whisk sugar into cold water and brandy that’s already got stuff in it.

6 - Take your sugar solution off the heat & let it cool a bit, then add the juice of yesterday’s bald orange and lemons and stir them together. Use fresh, not bottled stuff, even if this means you need another orange because you ate the one you zested yesterday. The original recipe says 1/4 cup each lemon and orange, but I like 1/4 cup lemon and 1/2 cup orange.

7 - Strain your brandy-with-stuff-in into the solution, discarding the zest that was in it. If you just put in strips of peel, this is easy - pick out the chunks and chuck ‘em. If you put in grated zest, you will need to use a strainer for all the little bits. Stir your liquids again to make sure everything is nicely mixed.

8 - GENTLY pour your brandy-juice-water-sugar mix into the milk that’s now a coolish room temperature. If you dump it all in at once, the milk can curdle too fast. And likewise, if you add the milk to the brandy instead, it will curdle instantly and then you lose the slow process that gives you good results.

9 - Give your horrible brandy-juice-water-sugar-milk concoction a gentle stir with a long handled spoon of some kind, so that there’s no untouched milk sitting at the bottom and no totally clear brandy stuff sitting at the top.

10 - Put the lid on your container, put it in your fridge, and WARN YOUR FLAT MATES/ FAMILY/ ROOMIE/ SPOUSE NOT TO TOUCH IT, because most people, on seeing a jug of horrible curdled milk hell, will sensibly want to throw it out. But they don’t know what we know about playing with booze and chemistry. Leave it for 24 hours.

11 - We are now on Day Three of making this cocktail. Take your horrible nasty curdled milk hell drink out of the fridge, noticing that it has settled into a thick curdy soft-cheese mass and a mostly clear liquid that’s still got some funky looking stuff. Line a strainer with a coffee filter, and begin to decant from the fridge jug into a new container via your filter. I find it helpful to stick the strainer atop a funnel for this part, since most liquid containers have narrow mouths better suited to funnels than to big round strainers.

12 - You will go through a few coffee filters, because the milk curds will start to clog it up pretty quickly on your first round. I throw out the clogged filter and replace it wth a new one every time the flow of liquid from filter into container gets to just being a very, very slow drip.

13 - Great, now do that again. Despite the loving care of multiple coffee filters, some sediment from the milk will probably have gotten into your lovely end result. The original recipe suggests two rounds, but I usually do three rounds of filtration to get the level of clarity I’m happy with. Final round is filtered into your nice bottle for storage.

14 - Done! Seal your bottle of fancy booze, and store it in the fridge (or, if you live somewhere that’s temperate bordering on cool & have access to a root cellar or similar storage location, store it outdoors in the ground away from sunlight as Charles Dickens used to do and as my girlfriend’s mountain-dwelling Welsh family still do).

note: this recipe should taste decent immediately, but the flavour develops when it has more time to really commingle so it’s totally worth coming back to after a month. If you decide you want to experiment and use other boozes & fruits as a base, just keep it acidic and note that some flavours take longer to mellow than others.