How to serve homemade cinnamon schnapps warm
How to serve a homemade cinnamon schnapps warm without wrecking it
A hot cinnamon drink on a cold night is one of the better things you can do with a bottle of homemade schnapps, and it's also the easiest way to waste one. Heat is not gentle on a spirit. Push it too far and the cinnamon goes dull while the sugar takes over, and most of what you spent time getting right walks out of the pan as steam.
So the question isn't whether you can serve it warm, because you can. The question is how warm, and that one has an actual answer.
How hot is too hot
Alcohol boils at about 78 degrees and water at 100, so anything you put over a flame is losing the alcohol first. You don't really need a thermometer to work with that. What you need is a pan that never gets past a lazy steam, and a glass you can hold your hand against without flinching.
If it simmers you've gone too far. If it boils you've made warm cordial.
The other half of it is when you add the schnapps. Warm your juice first, take the pan off the heat, then stir the spirit through last. That way the cinnamon goes into a warm liquid instead of a hot one, and it keeps the smell that makes the drink worth making in the first place.
What to warm it with
Still Spirits Hot Cinnamon Schnapps is already doing the heavy lifting on flavour, so whatever you warm it with wants to be simple. Cloudy apple juice is the obvious one, because apple and cinnamon are an old pairing and the cloudiness gives the drink a bit of body. A squeeze of lemon stops it sliding into dessert territory.
A warm cinnamon drink, roughly
- 45ml of your finished cinnamon schnapps
- 90ml cloudy apple juice
- 15ml lemon juice
- A cinnamon stick standing in the glass, if you've got one
Warm the juice and the lemon in a small pan until it steams. Take it off the heat. Stir the schnapps through, pour it into a heatproof glass and leave the cinnamon stick in it.
Those ratios are a starting point rather than a rule. If you like it sharper, more lemon. If you want it to go further round a table, more juice and the same amount of spirit.
When to leave it cold
Warm doesn't suit every batch. A schnapps that came out sweeter than you meant it to will taste sweeter still once it's warm, because heat flattens the sharp edges and the sugar is what's left standing. Same goes for a batch you're not happy with. Warming it won't hide the fault, it'll just make it louder.
A cold pour over one big cube is a fairer test of what you actually made, so do that one first and warm the second.
The licence bit, said plainly
Owning a still is legal in Australia and so is buying one from us, and that's where a lot of posts stop. Distilling spirits at home needs an excise manufacturer licence from the ATO, and sorting that out is on you before you run anything through it. Flavouring a bought base spirit with an essence is a different job again and it doesn't need a licence at all.
Shop related products
- Still Spirits Hot Cinnamon Schnapps. The essence the whole thing is built on.
- Still Spirits Schnapps Base 300g. The sugar side of a schnapps, so you're not guessing with syrup.
- Still Spirits Cinnamon Whisky 50ML. Cinnamon again, sitting on a whiskey base instead of a clear one.
- Still Spirits Liqueur Base A. Worth having on the shelf once you make more than one liqueur.
Did you know we also keep a fair bit of the homebrew range in the shop that never makes it onto the website. Give us a ring on (08) 8536 4333 and we'll tell you what's on the shelf.
Not sure which essence you're after? Brewhilder is our homebrew adviser and she'll talk you through it, or you can come in and have a yak with us.
There's more in the Still Spirits range and across the wider homebrew section.
Read next
- Still Spirits Hot Cinnamon Schnapps, what it does
- Why the liqueur base matters more than the essence
- What you need to make spirits at home
I'm the one who puts the mug down and forgets about it, so mine is usually lukewarm by the time I get back to it.
Cheers,
Candeece
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