How To Make Homemade Coffee Liqueur

Handmade gifts make some of the best gifts for friends and loved ones. This holiday season, you can treat people to something special with homemade Coffee Liqueur. 

To create this recipe, we consulted with an expert beverage director who has experience crafting liqueurs with spirits distillers.

It’s incredibly easy to make, besides needing a little patience while you wait for the coffee and ingredients to extract. After a week, it’s ready to be gifted or enjoyed at holiday parties and at home.

For making a flavorful, sweet coffee liqueur, you will want to use whole medium roasted coffee beans. Dark roasts can work, but may end up a little more bitter. Light roasts may not extract enough flavor. Our Vivace Whole Bean Coffee is our most popular coffee, and is the perfect blend for extracting flavor in homemade coffee liqueur. 

Another important part of a good coffee liqueur is sourcing a vanilla bean. They can be difficult to find, but you only need a quarter for this recipe. We kept this recipe simple, but you can also  experiment with adding different spices such as cardamom pods, clove, or star of anise.

For this recipe, you will need whole bean coffee, a vanilla bean, sugar, cacao nibs, and high proof alcohol (95% alcohol is ideal). High proof alcohol is necessary, as it dissolves and draws out compounds like alkaloids, tannins, and resins more effectively than lower-proof alcohols or water. 

At the end of the extraction process, the final step is to add water and simple syrup to the solution in order to “proof down” the liqueur, decreasing the alcohol content.

(We recommend adding the approximate alcohol proof on the label, just to give your recipient a heads up. The approximate proof is provided below if you follow the recipe.)