Green walnuts

This essence yields about 3 bottles of schnapps. You need to arm yourself with patience – it takes about 1-1½ years to make a good walnut schnapps.

Ingredients:
8-10 green and unripe walnuts (approx. 300 gr.)
3 bottles of vodka or neutral schnapps
1 glass (with a lid) of about 1 liter
1 serving of good patience

Here's how you do it:
Unripe walnuts contain a juice that stains quite strongly, so it's a good idea to wear gloves when cutting them.

Split your walnuts and cut them into quarters or halves. Put them in your glass and pour the spirits over your walnuts so they are just covered (approx. 4-5 dl). The glass must be twice the size of the walnuts. It is important that they have the opportunity to breathe. Therefore, the glass should not be completely filled. There should also be air left in the glass.

Feel free to shake your glass every 14 days, and lift the lid slightly to reintroduce some oxygen. Put it in a dark spot and let it steep for at least 5 months. Once you've been very patient – remove the walnuts and filter the schnapps. Then let the schnapps run through a clean coffee filter a few times, and you should be left with a nice dark brown walnut essence. Put it in a bottle and let it sit for at least another month – preferably 6 months.

We recommend mixing essence in the ratio 1 part essens 6 part neutral vodka or schnapps. We use approx 1/3 batch of essence for one bottle of schnapps, but we encourage adding it in little by little to find your own preference. Once you've diluted the essence, the walnut schnapps has to sit for another month, so that the taste is allowed to gather and to become rounder in flavor. The longer you let a walnut snap sit and gather, the better it will be; it only gets better with each passing year.