Caramel piracy
Over a weekend when I was staying with a couple of friends, they explained the technique for making caramel rum, wherein you put a packet's worth of a particular brand of caramel sweet into a bottle of rum and left it for three weeks, over which time the sweets and the alcohol would interact and infuse to form a sweet and potent cocktail.

I bought a bottle of paint-strippingly acrid agricultural rum, stuffed a bag of said caramels into it and left it in the kitchen cupboard for three weeks. Shook the outcome when the maceration period was over, and it had indeed turned an even and enticing caramel colour.

When you tasted it, you could feel two distinct layers of flavour on your tongue: pickled caramel with a hint of herring on the top, and vintage white spirit aged in plastic barrels underneath. The magical alchemy of chemistry had somehow combined to blend together the worst aspects of each individual ingredient and intensify them until they took centre stage. I christened it Care Bear Bile and served it to guests that I didn't like.
( .Yeti. El amor en los tiempos del cólera, Fri 5 Dec 2014, 14:54, Reply)