Clarified Gin Milk Punch

The clarified milk punch is an old recipe that’s regaining in popularity.

Quick rant: whoever tells you the old fashioned is the oldest cocktail is full of shit. American statesman (and notorious womanizer) Ben Franklin, wrote about his milk punch in a 1763 letter to his friend James Bowdoin. We’ll try remaking Franklin’s recipe at some point, but in the mean time the article here gives a good approximation.

To be honest, we have talked about making this cocktail for about 2 solid years now, but procrastinated until yesterday. Turns out it is actually quite easy.

Clarifying Milk

To gets started clarify some milk! Clarified milk punches aren’t nearly as annoying to make as you might think! It’s a nice taste-to-active-time cocktail. To get started, just mix milk (we used whole) and lemon juice, 3:1. Cover it, pop it in the refrigerator, and take out after 30 minutes or the next day. Cover a mesh strainer with a nut bag or a coffee filter, a steaming filter, and let it sit there and strain.

It takes ~15 minutes to strain the bulk out. Once you’ve strained it out, you can squeeze some out by holding the curds in the filter and squeezing over a bowl. We threw away the curds but you can always use them for protein… probably.

Once you’re done with clarified milk, just mix it together with the other ingredients, stir, strain and serve.

The easiness of the process made us try the same thing with goat milk kefir. We’ll keep this updated once we figure out if that will work (but it’s taking forever to strain).

Ingredients

• 1.5 oz Gin (Portobello Road)
• .5 oz Banana Liqueur (Giffard’s Banana du Bresil)
• .75 oz Clarified Milk (3:1)

Glass

Old Fashioned Glass

Time

30 minutes – 24 hours inactive. 5-10 minutes active

Instructions

• To make the clarified milk, add lemon juice and whole milk to a glass jar and let sit in the refrigerator for 30 minutes to 8 hours.
• Strain clarified milk and store.
• Add clarified milk and other ingredients to shaker.
• Stir and strain into a glass with a mega clarified ice cube.
• Garnish with rosemary sprig.