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player ready...Taste is a powerful thing. Take a sip of a spirit, say Laphroaig 15-year-old Scotch, and the whiskey’s robust peaty flavor can transport you to the rocky, remote Isle of Islay.
Liqueurs are no different. Think France and Grand Marnier. Ireland and Baileys. Mexico and Kahlua. But India, despite being home to 1.2 billion people, has never had that type of association with an internationally known liqueur.
“The category doesn’t exist,” says former business consultant Pankaj Garg. “It’s crazy that one-fifth of the world’s population doesn’t have any representation when it comes to liqueurs.”
Garg saw the lack of a widely available liqueur (there appears to be an Indian cream-based liqueur called Voodoo that isn’t available in the United States) as an opportunity.
Having grown weary of consulting work, he quit and entered the spirits business to attempt to craft an Indian-influenced liqueur.
He had a clear inspiration for the drink: Rasmalai, a creamy Indian dessert often made with spices like cardamom, plus pistachios and almonds, as well as natural rose extract. But making a liqueur that captured the essence of rasmalai came with a challenge: Rasmalai is one of those foods, like pizza, that sparks strong opinions and there’s no consensus about what it should taste like.
Garg and his wife Swati experimented with hundreds of recipes to determine the formula they’d base the liqueur on. The process dragged on for a couple years. But once they had it — spicy, but not too spicy, floral, but not too floral, a little bit nutty — they knew it. They then worked with a company to convert the recipe into a liqueur.
What they ended up with is a spirit they call Somrus (Hindi for nectar of gods), which has a cream and Caribbean rum base that is flavored with cardamom, saffron, almonds, pistachios and rose.
The result is creamy, earthy, floral and nutty too. It works well on its own, served chilled in a glass. Or, as I like it, poured over vanilla ice cream. Garg suggests adding a shot to strong black tea, just as you can add a shot of Bailey’s to make an Irish coffee, or in cocktails as a substitute for Bailey’s.
And it does taste like rasmalai. If you close your eyes it might even make you conjure up India, even if it isn’t produced there.
Somrus is available at some Illinois stores; otherwise, order online at somrus.com.