It’s been more than a month since I started a batch of nocino, a liqueur infusion made with green walnuts and bit of spice. I used foraged unripe black walnuts that I nicked from a park on Massachusetts Avenue. When I quartered the walnuts, they had a heady aroma that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It was minty and licoricey and peppery and grassy all at the same time. And when the walnut quarters first went into the vodka and sugar, the mixture was a beautiful pale green.
Well, a couple days later the mixture had turned a glassy blue-ish green. It was developing none of the carmelly brown color nocino is supposed to have. Every day, more inky green clouds would leech into the liquid.
Now, after another month, the concoction is the color of bilge-water. A cloudy and greenish-brown syrupy mess.
Yes, I tasted it. I tried it both at room temperature and over ice. The taste is… well, this strange brew does taste better than it looks, but that’s not saying much. It’s rather medicinal and unsettling, though intriguing enough to be worth a taste. I’ve never had real nocino, so I’m not sure whether this version tastes like it’s supposed to.
Overall, I have to call this experiment a failure. There’s still something I find incredibly tantalizing about the smell of green walnuts, but this bile-like substance is really not very appetizing.
Kudos for at least having the guts to try it out. Honestly, it looks pretty icky, but I am sure many of us have been at that point where things didn’t turn out quite the way we hoped, but you can’t bear to just toss it without testing.
That sh**t looks gross. Seriously.
Ah, sad that it didn’t turn out well. But it wouldn’t be an experiment without some element of risk. I wonder what the pros do differently . . .
[...] Some experiments refuse to end. Before I deemed it a failure, I bottled up most of the the black walnut nocino into a fancy bottle. But there was some of the vile green liquid left over, and I just left it in [...]
You probably needed to let more air into the mixture to get a better black/brown color. Open the lid every few days to exchange the air, and shake it up to make sure the oxygen infuses through the mixture. It’s the same chemical reaction that starts turning the fruits green the instant they’re cut.
Also, what did you use to filter it?
And it takes at least six months of further aging before it’s remotely drinkable. A year in a sealed bottle at room temperature after it’s filtered is even better.
My mother and i just discovered that the strange citrus smelling fruit tree in our backyard is a black walnut tree! Thank you so much for posting your Nocino experiment. I hope that the remainder of your batch turned out well in the end! We are definitely going to try it.