Two posts about home-flavoured vodkas in a row may cause you to worry about my alcohol intake, but there’s no need. I’m not actually very fond of alcohol, but it is fun to play with.

In years gone by I used to make sickly experimental vodkas by chopping up chocolate bars, pushing them into a vodka bottle, sealing the whole thing back up and putting it through a dishwasher cycle. They turned out surprisingly well, but you need a confident stomach to drink more than a shot or two.

Mint vodka came about because of some rampaging mint in T’s garden. After some online research H crammed a load of fresh mint into a jar of vodka. A month later I strained out the leaves, made some sugar syrup and poured that in, then we left it alone for a few months.

The first thing that probably strikes you is its extreme non-greenness.  The internet suggests the mint leaves have been pickled by the alcohol (yummy!) but despite its tea-like appearance, it actually tastes pretty good.

We did try to fix the colour by some judicious application of green food dye, but while it did turn green, it also went very dark, and we weren’t happy with the amount of colouring we were adding (enough to make small children extremely excited, although if you’re feeding them dyed vodka, I think you’ve got bigger problems).

We are going to hide some in chocolate truffles and perhaps blend the rest with dark rum and use in a version of a mojito. It has a clean fresh mint taste, and while for me, I think it could be sweeter, it works well with lemonade.