After some time spent looking around for off-the-shelf ginger vodka with which to re-create the Ginger Cosmo at Excelsior here in Boston, I gave up and decided that there was really only one way to get the central ingredient for this cocktail.

To make it myself.

Not only did I think it’d be kind of fun, and awfully easy…but it would certainly be gentler on the wallet than downing the real thing at the Excelsior bar. A bottle of Vodka is under twenty bucks, and ginger root is cheap, while the Ginger Cosmo runs $12 per drink.

And off we go.

The ingredients are assembled and ready to go. Once piece of fresh ginger root, one bottle of Level Vodka, a knife, and a cutting board. I also grabbed a small jar, as I needed to pour out some vodka to make room in the bottle for the ginger root (I wasn’t about to do 4 shots at 10am)…and since I had some spare vodka and some fresh blueberries, I thought I would double my vodka infusion pleasure with a mini-batch of blueberry vodka.

A handful of blueberries from Russo’s go into the jar, ready to meet their vodka soaked fate and infuse themselves into the booze.

Mushed up nicely, since popping the berries allows the blueberry-ness to mingle with the vodka. The gunk from the berries will be strained later when it is drinking time.

Add vodka, shake, and seal nice and tightly. This will sit in a nice dark spot for about a week, before it is strained (probably through a coffee filter) and mixed into a nice cocktail.

The ginger root is peeled and ready to be chopped up and added to the booze. Kind of a pain in the ass to peel given it’s shape and rough edge. As soon as you peel the ginger though, the smell is intense and pretty awesome.

I went with a pretty rough chop. No need to mince this stuff, but just enough to get it through the small opening of the bottle and to really release some of the ginger-ness. I read that 1/2 cup per 750ML is a good ratio, but since I removed some of the vodka from the bottle up front, this will end up a slight bit more concentrated. Fine by me though, I tend to err on the side of more flavor, rather than less.

In it goes. A little shake, and along with the blueberry batch, this heads into a nice dark spot to work it’s magic. A little shake every few days, and in about two-weeks, this should be ready to go. From there, it is Ginger Cosmo time.

In case you are wondering, the ingredients are…

* 1 1/3 cups Triple Sec
* 1 cup white cranberry juice
* 1/2 cup fresh lime juice
* 12 pieces candied ginger on bamboo picks, for garnish

I’ll report back in a couple of weeks with some details on how it all came out. Looking and smelling good so far though.

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