Limoncello, Arancello, and Pompelmocello: Mashes Ready for Testing

It's been three months since we set the Limoncello, Arancello, and Pompelmocello mashes to rest. Today I tested peels from each to see if the mashes were ready. Simply bending a peel allows you to check its rigidity; when the peel "breaks" in half easily, the mash is ready. Here's a look at the peels and the infused Everclear from each batch:

Lemons

 

Oranges

Grapefruit

The lemon and grapefruit peels broke easily, while the orange peel did not break at all.  All three of the batches were full flavored, but light in color.  I've decided to let them sit a while longer.

The final steps, once the mashes are ready, is to combine the infused Everclear with a simple sugar, filter (or not), then bottle.  You can find the full recipe here with some tweaks on the mash prep here.

Limoncello, Arancello, and Pompelmocello

Last year's Meyer limoncello was amazing, so we decided to do it again.  This year, however, we made mashes for limoncello, arancello, and pompelmocello.

The first time we tried limoncello we researched like crazy and measured carefully.  This time we took a more casual approach ~ results to be determined.  We started with our bountiful Meyer lemon, orange, and grapefruit trees and 6 one liter Le Parfait canning jars.  The steps are as follows:

• Pick and wash fruit; peel ~ avoiding as much pith as possible.
• Pack peelings into canning jars.
• Fill jars with alcohol of choice; we use Everlclear.
• Push peels down to press out the air bubbles; add more alcohol as needed to cover peels.
• Seal jars and place in cool, dark location.

As a ratio, it seems 1.5L of alcohol is what's needed to fill 2 1L canning jars well packed with peels.

Big lessons learned last year were:

1. Let the mash sit.  There is no hurry and the longer it rests the fuller the flavor.
2. Let the simple syrup cool before mixing with the strained mash.  Despite straining the mash well, our limoncello was cloudy as a result of mixing it with warm to hot syrup.

Of the three I'm most interested in the pompelmocello.  Stay tuned ...