🌿This intensely captivating botanical liqueur will send you into raptures of fragrant bliss. Scented geraniums are among the most exquisitely scented plants I've ever experienced. And their intoxicating scent translates beautifully into this elegant drink. You can make this herbal liqueur by growing varieties with fragrances such as rose, lemon, orange, as well as various other fruits, spices, and more. This liqueur is simple to make, with only three ingredients, and the enchanting flavor is so much more than the sum of its parts. And it's ready in only a few weeks. This drink is gorgeous to sip on its own or to add to cocktails for an incredibly special botanical twist. I hope you'll try making your own Homemade Scented Geranium Liqueur!
Jump to:
- 💕Why scented geraniums are special
- 🥂Scented geranium liqueurs I've made
- 🌸Deeply beautiful botanical flavors
- 📜Small-batch artisanal tradition
- 🍹A 30-year collection of homemade liqueurs
- 📓Ingredient notes
- 📒Step by step instructions & photos
- 💡Tips for success
- 🥣Equipment
- ⏲Make ahead and storage
- 🍲Serving suggestions
- ❓FAQ
- ✨More food and gardening posts you'll love
- Homemade Scented Geranium Liqueur
💕Why scented geraniums are special
Scented geraniums are also known as pelargoniums, and I'll be using these terms interchangeably throughout this post. They have beautiful ornamental appeal in addition to having the most wonderful fragrance you can imagine. And they often display gorgeous flowers as well.
You can grow them all summer in large pots on your patio or in the ground in a flower bed, and then use the leaves to make this exquisite liqueur. To help you choose some varieties to grow for this drink, please check out my post 26 Scented Geranium Varieties to Grow: Culinary Scents and Cuttings.
In that guide, I discuss 26 varieties I've grown with fragrances and flavors that include categories such as:
- Rose
- Citrus
- Non-citrus fruit
- Mint
- Spice
- Pine / woodsy
The sky's the limit! Enjoy choosing types of pelargoniums to grow based on your own preferences. If you've never experienced these incredibly fragrant plants, I know you'll be so pleasantly surprised at the depth and nuance in these incredible scents and flavors. There are still so many varieties that I'd love to grow.
🥂Scented geranium liqueurs I've made
I've taken four of the varieties that I've grown and had in leaves of in abundance, and created this enchanting liqueur from each one. These are all among my favorites for incredible fragrance. Here are the four types I've just made, with my own scent notes for each of these types:
Attar of Roses
My scent notes: Amazing, thrilling rose scent, deep and strong, so perfumed and fragrant, sophisticated and elegant, deeply enjoyable and transfixing to smell, just wonderful.
Grey Lady Plymouth
My scent notes: So sweet, bright lemon, deeply tangy, sweet and sour, fresh meadows, lemon pastries, sunny skies, light, clean breezes.
Rober's Lemon Rose
My scent notes: The deepest of lemon and rose, astoundingly accurate name, so enjoyable to smell, the best perfume ever, you have to smell this to believe how enjoyable this is, really one of my favorites, so special, so fresh, deeply fragrant, beautiful citrus, deep musky florals, richly spiced, so wonderful; I asked my son to smell this one and he exclaimed with surprise and profanity how delicious the fragrance is.
True Rose
My scent notes: Deep, rich and delightful, damask rose, richly perfumed fabrics, so floral, rich, and deep, truly enchanting rose fragrance, wonderful aroma, clean and uplifting. You have to smell this to believe it. I just love this one, so stunningly floral and botanical, it would make an amazing perfume.
🌸Deeply beautiful botanical flavors
The four liqueurs I've made from the above varieties of pelargonium are all stunning in their own right, with their flavors mirroring the inviting fragrances of each one listed above. We just adore the alluring botanical experience that these liqueurs lend to a sipping or cocktail mixing experience among friends and family.
📜Small-batch artisanal tradition
This scented geranium liqueur is in the style of a European crème liqueur, which means that it contains at least 250 g/L of sugar. (But there's no cream, as the name might otherwise suggest. This drink, like all of my recipes, is fully plant-based.)
This recipe contains 325 g of added sugar per liter, which I settled upon after very carefully tasting, adding, and tasting again with small incremental additions. Since dissolved sugar increases the final volume of the liquid, the final liqueur contains approximately 265-275 g per finished liter.
This puts my scented geranium liqueur within the sweetness realm of many beloved small batch botanical European artisanal liqueurs. I'm so thrilled to have found the perfect balance of smooth sipping and round botanical flavors with this recipe. It also closely mirrors the style of several of my other homemade liqueur recipes, which you can see below. I'm so excited to share this new recipe addition with you!
🍹A 30-year collection of homemade liqueurs
I've been growing culinary herbs and creating my own herbal and other botanical liqueurs and cocktails for about 30 years. I'm so proud to add this deeply flavorful scented geranium liqueur to my other homemade drink recipes, several of which I've posted and included below. Please check them out! I know you'll love them.
Liqueurs
Homemade Lemon Verbena Liqueur (Liqueur de Verveine)
Lavender Liqueur Recipe - Liqueur de Lavande Recette
Liqueur de Vanille Fait Maison (Vanilla Bean Liqueur)
Cocktails
Sunrise à la Plage - Frozen Mango Pineapple Rum Cocktail
Lavande Vanille Royale Champagne Cocktail
📓Ingredient notes
- Scented geranium leaves: Use an incredibly fragrant variety of your choice, preferably after you've grown the plant all summer and enjoyed the lush leaves, flowers, and scents. There's no need to bruise or cut the leaves, as the primary component of flavor comes from essential oils stored in the trichomes on the surface of the leaves. Just add them to the jar whole.
- Vodka, 40% ABV: I use a good quality brand that will marry well with the flavor of the leaves. To make around one liter of liqueur, you'll need one 750 mL bottle of vodka.
- Granulated sugar: I use Pioneer beet sugar that's made near my hometown, and organic cane sugar works well too.
See recipe card for quantities.
📒Step by step instructions & photos
- Step 1: Add clean scented geranium leaves of your choice to a wide-mouthed, airtight jar. Add the vodka. Keep in a cool, dark place, shaking occasionally, for at least 3 to 4 weeks until the liquid is full of flavor.
- Step 2: Strain out leaves and add sugar to the jar. Stir or shake until dissolved. Use a funnel to transfer the fished liqueur to a clean airtight 1-liter bottle. Serve chilled and enjoy!
💡Tips for success
Grow your scented geraniums organically: It's important to keep the plants free of chemicals since you'll be using the leaves to create your liqueur.
Taste as you go: As you shake the jar of leaves and vodka, taste it occasionally until the flavor is as pronounced as you prefer. It should start to mature after just a few weeks.
The sugar will soften the flavor: Don't worry if your infusion yields a strong or even harsh flavor after steeping. I thought I'd ruined mine at this point! But it still turned out wonderfully. Please remember that the sugar will soften the harsh notes in the vodka, and will round out the wonderful, deeply botanical notes from the leaves. Hang in there!
🥣Equipment
- Digital scale: For weighing the leaves and sugar. I love using this OXO Good Grips one, which I've just used to replace my previous scale that broke after using it for decades.
- Two-liter wide-mouth airtight jar: I use Bormioli Rocco Fido jars to make my liqueurs. Their wide openings make it easy to add large leaves for this liqueur, and the seals hold tight while shaking to distribute the flavors.
- Strainer or colander: To drain the leaves out of the liquid after steeping.
- Funnel: To add the sugar to the jar, and also to add the finished liqueur to your final bottle. I love using this funnel set with built-in strainers, as they help to filter out any additional leaf particles that the initial straining may have missed.
- One-liter airtight bottle: I like to use good-quality swing-top bottles with an airtight seal. They're reusable, and they hold up really well to many batches of homemade liqueur making!
⏲Make ahead and storage
Make ahead
This liqueur takes around 3 to 4 weeks to make. It takes this long for the flavors to blend while the leaves steep in the vodka with occasional shaking in a cool and dark place. The time can vary according to individual taste. Then we strain out the leaves, add the sugar, and it's then ready to enjoy!
Refrigerate
I love to serve this liqueur chilled. The fridge is one easy way to do this, by storing it in an airtight bottle.
Freeze
The freezer is even better! The alcohol content prevents the liquid from freezing solid. And I love the sheen of frost that develops on the outside of a bottle when we bring it out of the freezer to serve. This liqueur is wonderful served chilled and neat or over ice. Both ways are divine!
🍲Serving suggestions
Apéritif or cocktail
As a before-dinner drink, you can serve this liqueur in a sparkling or citrus-forward cocktail. This would be a wonderful drink to enjoy before a meal with friends.
Digestif
Scented geranium liqueur is so elegant, smooth, and satisfying as an after-dinner drink. You can serve it straight from the freezer and pour over ice for a beautiful way to cap off a meal.
❓FAQ
Please check out my post 26 Scented Geranium Varieties to Grow: Culinary Scents and Cuttings for information about how to grow these stunningly scented flowering herbs.
Some pelargoniums (aka scented geraniums) can be grown from seed, but most of the varieties that we grow for use in the kitchen are sold as plants. You can also grow your own and take cuttings as I do to keep them going indoors over the winter. Please see the post above in question 1 to learn how to take cuttings. This really saves on the cost of buying these plants when you can multiply your own stock each year! Also, you can find scented geranium plants at rare herb vendors like Richters Herbs or Ginger's Greenhouse.
My friends and family have been absolutely shocked at the incredibly enjoyable fragrance of these culinary flowering herbs. They even gasp when they smell them! And even for me, when I've been growing these plants for years, I'm still so pleasantly surprised each time I smell one. They really are just divine. More people should know about and start growing these wonderful plants!
It takes about 3-4 weeks, give or take (for individual taste), for the leaves to finish steeping in the vodka, and then we add the sugar and dissolve it to finish the process. Whether floral, fruity, or spiced, this liqueur is worth the wait!
In my post above from question 1, you can read my scent notes from the 26 types of scented geraniums I've grown. Rose-scented geraniums are some of the best-known, but there are so many wonderfully fragrant additional types out there. They're absolutely fantastic. I'm going to keep growing more varieties to learn about as many of these amazing plants as I can. I hope you do too!
✨More food and gardening posts you'll love
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✏️Did you make this recipe?
Please let me know in the reviews and comments below!
Homemade Scented Geranium Liqueur
Ingredients
- 90 g fresh, whole, clean scented geranium leaves
- 750 mL vodka, 40% ABV, about 3 ¼ cups, 80 proof
- 245 g granulated sugar, about 1¼ cups
Instructions
- Make sure your scented geranium leaves are clean and undamaged. Keep them whole and handle them gently when using.
- Add the leaves to a clean airtight 2-liter wide-mouth jar. Pour the vodka over them.
- Seal the jar tightly and place it in a cool, dark place. Shake the jar about once daily for two weeks, then every other day for another week or two, tasting as you go. Continue steeping until the scent and flavor are fully developed to your liking. Don't worry if still harsh; the addition of sugar will soften this. Generally the steeping time is around 3-4 weeks.
- Strain the leaves out of the vodka using a strainer or colander. Do not squeeze the leaves.
- Return the liquid to the jar and add the sugar. Stir or seal and shake the jar until the sugar is fully dissolved.
- Use a funnel to pour the liquid into a clean, airtight 1-liter bottle. Store the bottle at room temperature, in the fridge, or in the freezer. Serve chilled and/or over ice.
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