How to Make Cherry Cordial (Part 2)

As promised, it's the end of June, and here's Part 2 of my "How to Make Cherry Cordial" post.

As you may remember, the cherries and cinnamon sticks have been steeping in the brandy for about a month now. Yesterday, I opened the jars and strained the liquid. As you can see, the brandy leached not only most of the flavor, but also most of the color out of the cherries.


Next, I put a paper coffee filter (wetted with water, for ease of handling and to help speed the initial filtering) into a large funnel, and began filtering the cordials. This is the most tedious part of the cordial making process, because some cordials take a VERY long time to filter. But this one wasn't too bad.

While I was filtering, Ken made the sugar syrup. To do this, you heat 2 cups of sugar and 1 cup of water in a saucepan, stirring constantly until it just starts to boil and the liquid suddenly goes clear. Then remove the pan from the heat. This makes 2 cups of syrup.

When the cordial is done filtering and the sugar syrup is cool, you just add the syrup to the cordial, tasting frequently, until it is as sweet as you like it.

In this case, Ken and I felt that the cinnamon flavor was too strong and the cherry flavor was too weak, but we noticed that the cherry flavor became more prominent the more syrup we added. So we made a sweeter cordial than we normally do, by adding the entire 2 cups of sugar syrup.

The result was 2 mason jars almost full of cherry cordial, which will need to steep for about a week to reach full flavor.

Normally I bottle my cordials in pretty, tall, long-necked bottles, but this time around, I made this batch knowing that we're having a bunch of friends over for the July 4th weekend, and we'll probably drink most of the cordial then, so I didn't bother with the fancy bottles, I just put the cordial back into the mason jars to wait until our friends arrive: