Easy Homemade Kahlua Coffee Liqueur Recipe

So a few months ago we showed a video of Clay's homecoming from alone and during that video it kind of documented what the kids and I were doing while he was gone and one of the things that I did was make homemade kalua and since we showed that video there's been a lot of interest in the recipe on how to make it and so today I'm going to show you how to make it. Okay so this is a really quick and easy recipe. So one of the main ingredients that you need is your liquor for this. Now you can do vodka or whiskey. Don't do both at the same time but if you're wanting a kalua like the kind that you get at the store, vodka is going to give you the most the most similar flavor from what you get at the store. Whiskey gives you a little bit of a stronger taste. When it comes to your liquor you don't have to buy expensive liquor. I mean this is pretty close to bottom shelf. This one's a little up but this one might have been on the bottom shelf but I save my money and just get the cheap stuff because when you make this your flavor is really coming from the type of coffee that you use. One of my favorite brands is Mt. Hagen. This is decaf. I don't ever buy decaf. I got this by accident but I'm going to use it. I got this on Amazon. Amazon it's like 10 bucks for this little container and for this recipe you only need one of these to make a single batch of this. You need vanilla beans. Now vanilla beans are really expensive so if you go to a grocery store or to Costco's or Sam's like they're asking like 30 bucks for like one or two beans. I buy all mine from a company called Beanella online. You have the option when you when you buy these to get grade A or grade B beans. So grade A beans are the more expensive type of bean. They are a plumper bean and you don't get as many when you buy grade A. You're going to buy per bean so it's pretty expensive but when you're making this kind of stuff you're cutting these beans apart and you're just scraping the inside of this out and so I get grade B. They're cheaper. They're a little bit skinnier. They're drier and so you're being I mean they're really not they're pretty flat but once you cut these cut into these the vanilla paste inside is really good. So the grade B vanilla beans that I get this pack has 25 pieces and you can get lower packs. I use a lot of vanilla beans and so I just buy the bigger pack but this recipe you use four to five beans. So you're looking at getting about five batches of Kluwe out of this pack which is a heck of a lot of Kluwe. We don't drink that much but here you go if you want to drink that much. And so another thing that we make out of these vanilla beans which is why I buy so many is homemade vanilla. When you start looking at buying like a good quality vanilla extract it's really expensive and so if you get this and make your own it's pretty cheap. And the last ingredient that you need is a big bowl of sugar. Now you can make this as sweet or unsweet as you want. So if you make a small batch of this and you realize that you know you want it sweeter you can just add sugar to it. It's not going to hurt anything to add more sugar or to take sugar away. So as I said this is a quick and easy recipe so you don't have to have a lot of stuff to make it. We're just going to be using a pot and I like to use a wooden spoon. It's just preference you can use whatever. You do need big jars to put this in and you need jars that seal very well. I have some gallon jars that I like but they don't seal and this is not good for this recipe because once you make this this has to sit for a month and every day or so when you go by you're going to give this a shake. And so if you don't have a good lid on it it drips out and then it gets where the lid you can't take the lid off very well. And then at the end of the month I like to bottle mine up. You can leave them in the big jars it won't hurt at all but if you want to bottle them up or give them away I like to use old wine bottles but you can keep it in the jar or if you want to put it in pint or quart size jars you can do that as well. One thing I should mention about your pot try to get a thicker bottom pot because when you put the sugar in there you have to dissolve it with the water and the coffee and if you don't watch it it will burn to the bottom and you don't want burnt Kahlua. All right so the first thing we're going to do is we're just going to put our sugar in our pot here. All right so for this recipe today I am using six cups of sugar. Now if you don't want to use that much you don't have to put that much in there or if you think this is not going to be sweet enough you can certainly add more sugar to it. You need a cup and a half of your coffee granules that's what's in this little container here. I make this recipe enough to know that and so you just pour this in on top. All right and then you're going to put four cups of water in with this as well. All right so then you're just going to give it a stir and then we're going to put it on the stove and let this slowly dissolve. You don't want to do this fast because you'll burn it. It doesn't take very long to dissolve but you just want to go slow at it and you're going to have to trust me on this. This is really good because at this stage it does not look good. All right so now this is mixed up we're going to go ahead and put this on the stove. All right so you don't have to continuously stir this but you don't want to walk away from the stove because once it starts dissolving it burns pretty quickly. So just stay near and just give it a little stir here and there and it only takes about five or ten minutes to get this ready to go. And another thing is you don't want to boil this. You just want to warm it up just enough to dissolve the sugar and it's almost I mean it's only been on here three minutes maybe and it's almost dissolved already. All right so that only took about five minutes to get that sugar dissolved. Now you have to let that cool on to room temperature before you can add your vanilla and your alcohol to it but like I said we can't do anything with that until it cools to room temperature and so I'm going to go ahead and get these vanilla beans ready and so they're ready to go. So I'm going to use five beans here. Now if you're using like I said these are grade B beans so they're a little bit drier and flatter. If you decide to buy the more expensive grade A beans you don't need this many you could probably get away with just two of those versus the five that I'm going to use. All right so you're just going to cut this down the middle of the bean here and so if you've never cut vanilla beans open when you cut these open there is a paste inside here. It smells really good and so all you do is just scrape this paste out. It is messy you're going to make a mess and just run your knife along it and scrape the paste out and so there's your paste. You're using your vanilla bean and the paste as well so I just put the paste in there and pull it off and then I just chop my vanilla bean up like that. If you want you can give the back a little scrape too to get some of the oils going and I just kind of split these up between two jars. Just don't cut yourself because these beans kind of like to move around when you're trying to cut them open and it doesn't have to be perfect you just want to get the majority of the stuff out of it and if it breaks apart that's fine too and some of these beans sometimes have a little bit less inside than the other ones and so if you get one that's really dry you can just add another bean to this. That one was kind of a dry one there. All right so this has been cooling for about an hour hour and a half. It doesn't have to get all the way cool it can still be just a little bit warm but you just don't want it really hot but right now it has a film on top a foam. It's really thick like I mean if you stick your finger in it it coats your finger and it tastes really good and this actually reminds me of when I was younger my dad took us to my pawpaw's house every weekend and he would give us coffee every time we went up there and it was a cup of sugar with a little bit of instant coffee and milk and this is exactly what it tastes like so brings back a lot of childhood memories but so now it's time though for us to add the alcohol. I'm going to add vodka in mine today. I've used whiskey before but I'm just going to go with vodka today and so I'm going to add six cups to this. It's about to slip out of my fingers. All right so there's six cups. You're just going to stir it around really good. All right so once you get here it doesn't look very good. It's one of those things you're going to trust me. It's really good but it's kind of kind of funky looking right now. All right so now we're just going to pour it into our jars that we put the vanilla beans in earlier and I just divide it up between the two jars. All right so give that a wipe down and then you put your jars on. All right and so that is it. I put a label on mine with the date because it's about a month before it's ready and you don't want to put this in the direct sunlight. I just keep ours sitting over here on our little bar that we have and then just whenever I go by I just give it a shake. As this sits it's going to get kind of a sludge at the bottom from the instant coffee but you know just shake it until that film on the bottom goes away every time. All right so I let this sit about a month. If you don't want to let it sit that long you can a couple weeks and then you can start drinking it but the longer you let it sit the more the flavors mix up. I bottle some of this and then I have some that's still sitting in the jars with vanilla beans and it's been there for a year and it's perfectly fine. It won't go bad but the longer you let it sit there the stronger it's going to get and the flavors are going to mingle better. And then I have the one this one has been sitting here for a month now and it's ready to go. So the first thing you want to do is you're going to strain it. I just got a like a wire mesh strainer here and I'm just going to strain this a little bit at a time just to get the vanilla bean pieces out of it. And this is the biggest measuring cup I have or if you have a bigger one you can do the whole thing at one time. All the stuff's usually at the bottom that you're wanting to strain out. All right and so I just put mine into old wine bottles or whatever kind of bottle liquor bottles that I have that I like and so we're going to stick some in this smaller bottle. It helps to have a funnel to be able to get this into it and then it's still thick so you have to go kind of slow or it's going to go over the top of the funnel. All right and so there is one bottle of Kahlua in the nice bottle. I'm going to leave the label on there because I like the label but if you give these for Christmas presents or anything you can order if you want to order labels you can get them off of Amazon. You can get a sheet and they'll stick on there or you can get some that you tie on there if you want to do that. All right so I hope you like the video today on making Kahlua. Just take the recipe and make it your own. You know add what you want to it. Try it with different alcohols and let me know what you think in the comments. Don't forget to subscribe because we have a lot more videos coming up. We have some fermented vegetables I'm fixing to be doing. Also head on over to Instagram. Stop! God! Okay also head over to Instagram and follow me there. You can find me at lifelike no I messed up. Dang it! I have to stop. I can't get it out. It's freaking tongue tie. I should have a different name. I feel like I'm doing wrong when you're starting to be like this and I'm just like I see you doing this and I'm like what am I doing wrong? It's like you're kind of being like yeah. Yeah at lifelike Lizzie and we'll see you next time. That's bad. That's bad. What's next?