A Year in Forty-Two Batches

January — starting cold

We opened the year with nine crates of Amalfi lemons and a heating bill that made us reconsider the whole enterprise. Batch one went into steel on the fourth and came out on the sixteenth of February, six weeks later almost to the hour.

It was fine. Not more than fine. Looking back at the tasting sheet, the note against B-001 reads simply: thin, but honest. We bottled it anyway, sold it in a fortnight, and learned that customers are considerably more forgiving in January than we are.

What January taught us

• Cold rooms slow maceration far more than the books suggest
• Six weeks is a guideline, not a recipe
• Nobody buys liqueur in the first week of the year, and that is fine

March — the peeling problem

By March we were doing three batches a month and the peeling had become the bottleneck. Four people, nine crates, an afternoon. We priced a machine. We watched a video of the machine working. We did not buy the machine.

The reason is not romance, or not only romance. A machine takes the peel at a uniform depth, which sounds like an improvement until you understand that the right depth varies fruit by fruit. A thick-skinned lemon wants a deeper cut. A thin one, cut the same way, brings pith into the vessel, and pith brings a bitterness that no amount of resting will remove.

We can either make more of it or keep making it this way. We picked one.

So we hired a fifth pair of hands instead, and the Thursday tasting sessions got noticeably louder.

June — the batch we poured away

B-019 was a redcurrant experiment. It smelled extraordinary at week two and turned, somewhere between week three and week four, into something that tasted like a cough remedy. We tried cutting it with a neutral batch. We tried more sugar. We tried, briefly and shamefully, telling ourselves it was interesting.

Then we poured 140 litres down the drain, which took nineteen minutes and cost about the same as a small holiday.

Three things we would do differently

1. Taste soft fruit twice a week, not once — the turn happens fast
2. Split experimental batches in half so a failure only costs half
3. Write the tasting note before looking at the previous week's note

That third one sounds like nothing. It is not nothing. Once you have read last week's promising, this week's palate finds promising.

September — the good one

B-031 is the reason we will do this again next year. Same hillside, same grower, same forty-two days — but the fruit came in after a dry August and the oil in the peel was extraordinary. We changed nothing and it changed everything.

The batch sold out in eleven days. We have kept six bottles back to open one a year, partly to see how it ages and mostly to remind ourselves what we are aiming at when a batch comes out merely fine.

Notes from the sheet, unedited:

• Nose — cut peel, wet stone, faint bay
• Palate — sharper than B-001, sweeter than B-019, longer than either
• Finish — keeps going for an embarrassingly long time
• Verdict — do not touch the recipe

December — forty-two

Forty-two batches. Two poured away, one given entirely to friends because the label printer misfired, thirty-nine sold. Roughly eleven thousand lemons, an unknowable quantity of quince, and one machine we did not buy.

Next year we want to get to fifty without changing how any of it is made, which may be arithmetically impossible. We will let you know in twelve months.

If you want to taste where we ended up, the range is here, and the batch number on the base of the bottle will tell you which part of this story you are drinking.