Garbageberry Vodka Infusion
In the chapter on invasive species in David Williams' awesome book The Street-Smart Naturalist he says of blackberries:
Ecologists don't like Himalayan blackberries because the dense thickets block light to other plats, reduce animal habitat, and hinder access to water in riparian zones, another area where blackberries flourish. With their rapid growth they can quickly outcompete natives and turn a diverse field into a monoculture. Himalayan blackberries, however, do have several features that make them less heinous than other invasives. The most obvious is the edible berry. Blackberries also do not grow well in the shade or in undisturbed habitat, which from an ecological standpoint makes them less troublesome than other invasives, in particular the city's worst offender, English ivy, Hedera heliz.
"Less heinous than English ivy"...high praise. Furthermore, Seattlest found a lot to agree with in a friend's recent rant against any urban vine fruit, local pedigree or not: It's dirty, polluted, fed with oily runoff water and choked with empty paper cups and plastic bags--Not necessarily an environment conducive to producing good eats. The phrase "garbage berry" also came up in reference to blackberries in that conversation.
But, you know, blackberries...they're there. That's an understatement, actually. They're everywhere, and a harvest is difficult to resist. We can't get very excited about a Seattle blackberry pie or a compote or anything along those lines, and we can barely bring ourselves to pop them straight, but a nice vodka infusion might be alright. Figuring the Polish cookbooks we have laying around might have something to say about infusing vodka, we cracked a few open and found only recipes involving grain alcohol and fermentations. Not what we're looking for. Nothing against fermentation--we already a fall cider planned--but this is a low patience operation. We'll just wing it and figure vodka+blackberries+a few days=blackberry vodka.
Employing Mrs. Seattlest as cheap labor we picked about ten cups of blackberries from the edges of Northlake Ave in twenty minutes or so. As we worked closer to the Burke-Gilman the pickin's got slimmer and it was obvious that many gatherers had been through before us.
You can buy vodka that's a little cheaper than Smirnoff, and a lot more expensive, but an 80 proof triple distilled 1.75L glass jug seemed to fall in the sweet spot of price, quality and volume. The berries got a thorough washing in the colander, which turned out to be problematic because some of them are very very ripe and tend to lose their structural integrity under the faucet. We figured smashed berries were better than berries covered in parking lot grime, though.
After ripping the little pour spout out of the vodka bottle we dumped the contents into a pitcher--Maybe a big, seal-able jar or something would be the best infusion vessel, but we didn't have anything like that on hand so we had to use the bottle the vodka came in. The berries went into the bottle one at a time, which proved to be a pretty messy operation. Blackberries are pretty stainy, it turns out, and cheap counter tops and hands might get a little discoloration that can't be easily defeated by soap and water.
We'd only put a few cups of the berries into the bottle when it became clear that our haul wouldn't completely fill the bottle, which is what we'd initially hoped for. We ended up filling the bottle a little more than a third of the way with blackberries, but they were packed in there pretty well and after pouring the vodka from the pitcher back into the bottle we found that they'd displaced roughly a third of the vodka. Good enough.
Now we wait. Hopefully we can hold out until the Labor Day weekend before straining and decanting. Hopefully, but maybe not. The vodka has already taken on a much deeper shade of red than seen in the picture above, and the berries have expanded to fill about half the bottle.
