My wife and I kinda have a love thing going on with IKEA. Throughout our 20 years of marriage and moving back and forth between two continents and 8 apartments, our IKEA furnishings in their unapologetic Swedishness have always provided a familiar sense of foreign dislocation that actually made us feel at home no matter where we were. To me, visiting an IKEA store is like stepping through a time portal that takes me back to all of the spaces we've called home, and recalls vivid, palpable memories of how it felt settling in to strange new surroundings and finding happiness.
We still pop into our local IKEA from time to time even if just to enjoy the familiar meal of meatballs and boiled potatoes with gravy and of course the delightfully foreign and festive lingonberry sauce. Sweeter and milder than cranberries, we've come to really enjoy IKEA's lingonberry jam and drinks over the years.
Recently, I discovered a forgotten bottle of lingonberry drink concentrate in the back of the skåp (cupboard to the layman) and thought it might be a fun project to ferment it like a wine, distill it, and then backsweeten it with more lingonberry juice to make a marginally palatable sipping liqueur, and finally repackage it back into its humble glass bottle. I'm really curious to find out whether it can be made into something worth drinking, and perhaps enjoy some alongside swedish meatballs.
Call it an IKEA hack if you will, or a Swedish berry blasphemy, but my objective here is simply to seek out a happy buzz that I assembled myself and can be proud of.
View recipe here: IKEA Dryck Lingon experiment | Alternative Sugar Beer Extract Beer Recipe | Brewer's Friend
We still pop into our local IKEA from time to time even if just to enjoy the familiar meal of meatballs and boiled potatoes with gravy and of course the delightfully foreign and festive lingonberry sauce. Sweeter and milder than cranberries, we've come to really enjoy IKEA's lingonberry jam and drinks over the years.
Recently, I discovered a forgotten bottle of lingonberry drink concentrate in the back of the skåp (cupboard to the layman) and thought it might be a fun project to ferment it like a wine, distill it, and then backsweeten it with more lingonberry juice to make a marginally palatable sipping liqueur, and finally repackage it back into its humble glass bottle. I'm really curious to find out whether it can be made into something worth drinking, and perhaps enjoy some alongside swedish meatballs.
Call it an IKEA hack if you will, or a Swedish berry blasphemy, but my objective here is simply to seek out a happy buzz that I assembled myself and can be proud of.
View recipe here: IKEA Dryck Lingon experiment | Alternative Sugar Beer Extract Beer Recipe | Brewer's Friend
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