Homemade Alien Wine Hibiscus (Rix) Recipe

From correspondent David Rix:

Hibiscus flower liqueur.

This uses a standard 70cl bottle

• Three generous tablespoons of dried hibiscus flowers (used in herb teas and available from health food shops)
• The rind of I lime
• About half a vanilla pod (or perhaps 3/4 teaspoon of vanilla essence).
• Vodka (70-cl bottle!)
• Sugar syrup to taste.

I simply added the three main ingredients and filled the bottle with the vodka (any leftover vodka I just put aside) - sealed it and steeped for 1 month and strained. It was at this point that I added the sugar. I find a lot of liqueur recipes too sweet (indeed, sometimes I think that some need hardly any sugar, or maybe even none!), so I just added a very little sugar syrup - perhaps a couple of tablespoons full. You can do this to taste though. Then I sealed with wax and aged for 1 month more. It could perhaps be aged for longer - perhaps I will experiment with three months one day.

The result is a liqueur that is so red it is almost black - totally opaque. It is sweet, and yet at the same time it has such an extraordinary arid and dry backtaste and a real punch to it. It is seriously delicious - one of my favourites so far - though people who prefer the sweet syrupy type liqueur might be blown away by it. It tastes quite unlike anything else I have ever tasted - and it was quickly nicknamed my 'alien wine'. Definitely one for sipping slowly on a long cold evening!

[Editor's note - you shouldn't need to seal it in wax. Any way your would normally seal a jar would be fine.