Orange Spice is one of our most popular bitters recipes, and with good reason.  This flavor is very versatile and can pair with many types of drinks from citrus to coffee. The ginger, cloves, star anise, and caraway give this recipes a complex, warm, spicy flavor while the horehound lends a minty bitterness. While dried sweet orange can be used, the combination of dried bitter orange and fresh sweet orange gives the most complete citrus flavor.Ingredients:4 tablespoons dried bitter (AKA: sour, Seville) orange peel, dried4 teaspoons dried horehound 2 teaspoons Oregon grape 2 teaspoons cara..

After a tasting event we had some left over ginger ale and sarsaparilla syrups from our homemade soda kits and lots of ice so we decided to get creative and turn those leftovers into fun summer cocktails. Serve in an insulated glass to keep your slushie cool on a hot day and a word of warning, don't use metal straws for these blended drinks unless you want to re-enact the flagpole scene from "A Christmas Story."Ginger Bourbon Slushie1.5 cups ice cubes1 ounce ginger ale syrup2 oz bourbonBlend until smooth and serve.- Peachy Ginger Bourbon Slushie: Use 1 cup frozen peach slices and 1/2 cup ice.R..

If you've never had homemade grenadine, you're in for a treat. Unlike the commercial stuff, which is little more than corn syrup and food coloring, this homemade grenadine uses real pomegranates and dried hibiscus flowers. If you can't buy fresh pomegranates, bottled not-from-concentrate juice (such as POM) can be substituted. The hibiscus and pomegranate juice give this grenadine and deep, garnet red that will give any drink a brilliant crimson hue.Hibiscus "flowers" are actually the fleshy red calyx that remains after the petals fall off. The fruit with its fuzzy black seeds is usually remov..

Today we take many spices for granted: pepper shakers on every table, that dusty bottle of cloves you pull out at Christmas, a splash of vanilla in everything from cookies to pudding. Five hundred years ago, things were much different, spices took a long journey passing through many hands to reach consumers. Many spices only grow in tropical countries such as India and Mexico, which are along way from the markets in Europe. The spice trade fueled wars, genocide, slavery, and European colonization of the globe.To learn more about how these seemingly simple ingredients changed the world, visit o..

I'm a big fan of the old style of botanical illustration. Sadly, many of the older botanical illustrations were painted or printed on paper that has yellowed or discolored in some fashion, muddying the colors of the original illustration. With a lot of tinkering, I've come up with a method to remove the yellow color from scanned images while preserving the original colors. I started with images from Franz Eugen Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen, downloaded from plantcurator.com. When I first started trying to restore the color in these images, I adjusted the hue, white balance, contrast, etc, b..