tl;dr

It was all Matt’s fault. Skittles and vodka, together at last. Toby and I decided we had to try this for ourselves. At 4:55pm the suggestion was made; by 5:15pm we were back from Asda.

(tucked away behind a clickthrough because of copious pictures)

You start with, predictably, Skittles and vodka. Plus, some water bottles and some funnels.

We used two litres of Vodka (Russian Standard, as it was on offer in Asda) and 800g of Skittles. We also needed bottles to hold the mixture; we bought a six-pack of 750ml water bottles for that.

First, separate the Skittles. This is tedious, but satisfying for any deep seated OCD urges you may have.

Pour the Skittles into the (emptied) water bottles and add the vodka.

Obviously, split the vodka between the bottles evenly. If you follow the proportions I’m outlining here, you’ll be adding 400ml of vodka to about 200ml of Skittles — note that a 500ml water bottle won’t be big enough.

With that done, it’s time to shake.

Quite quickly, you will find that the colouring on the outside of the Skittles dissolves in the vodka, leaving the white inner bits, which are mostly sugar and hydrogenated vegetable fat. We’ll get to that in a moment.

Try to do a better job of evening out the vodka than we did.

Now, you play the waiting game. You need to wait for all the sugar to dissolve into the vodka and all the fat to break up into tiny floating pieces, which is even more disgusting that it sounds. This took about 24 hours for us.

Once the Skittles are totally dissolved, you need the components for the next stage: filter paper and some sort of permanent bottle for storage. We went for 450ml bottles of Grolsch, as they were a convenient size and had those snazzy resealable lids.

Get more funnels too. You need several.

The basic idea is to filter the vodka/fat/sugar/flavouring mix through the coffee filter paper, removing the fat and leaving behind tasty goodness. Like this:

I told you it was pretty disgusting, didn't I?

General wisdom on the Internet is that you pass the mixture through several layers of coffee paper. General Internet wisdom is wrong (shock!), and here’s why.

Reason one: the papers are too fine

They are too fine because they clog too easily. In that picture there, we boldly poured most of the mixture in at once; within seconds, the trickle of filtrate emerging from the funnel had slowed to a drip, and then a slow drip, and then a really slow drip. We quickly found that a given filter paper is only good for about 100-200 ml of mixture, at the most, before it’s almost hopelessly blocked.

Reason two: the papers are too coarse

At least for us, the filtrate was not entirely clear. This would suggest there is some trace amounts of fat left in the mixture, although it wasn’t enough to form any sort of layer on top of the liquid. We decided to ignore this.

Reason three: multiple passes through identical filter papers don’t do anything

Think about it. Each filter paper has holes in of (roughly) the same size. What is the second, third, or fourth pass through holes of the same size supposed to do? I can even prove it with pictures. The liquids in the following pictures are the green (lime) flavour after one, two, and three passes through filter paper. Note that they are all of the same level of clarity.

What you should do — and what we will do next time — is get a selection of filter papers from a chemistry supplier of different granularities, then do multiple passes through finer and finer papers. This should solve both the excessive clogging and residual cloudiness issues.

Note, by the way, that every single item and surface within twenty feet of where you are working will get hopelessly sticky from doing this. Any tiny amount of spillage of the material results in a sugary glue-like substance within minutes as the vodka quickly evaporates away.

Filtering will take you much longer than you think because of the paper clogging. It took me several evenings to get it all finished, even doing several levels of the filtering in parallel. You can make the time go faster by disposing of the Grolsch.

You don't need this stuff. Get rid of it.

One final note on filtration; some stuff came up and I had to leave the orange flavour until a few days later. Perhaps because of the excessive wait, the orange dye became chemically bound to the fat. When I filtered it, I ended up with an almost completely clear liquid again.

The sugar and flavouring were present and correct, however, so this is just a cosmetic issue. Some orange food colouring would solve it.

So, with all the vodka filtered and bottled, it only remained to chill the bottles (in the freezer, of course), and try it out.

Note the liquids are quite cloudy here -- they became clearer as they warmed. I think the -20 degC serving temperature means the vodka cannot hold all the sugar in solution.

How do they taste, you may be wondering? The rather blasé answer is “just like Skittles”. Which is to say, firstly, the taste of the individual Skittle sweets comes through a lot stronger than you might think, and that the (very strong, of course) alcohol is better masked than you might think. The overall effect is rather like schnapps turned up to 11.

The nicest flavors were probably the orange and strawberry ones. Next were the blackcurrant and lemon ones; the least successful was the lime, which came across a bit like Apple Sourz (a drink I despise; fortunately the Skittles vodka is less pungently sour). They are all drinkable but I must admit they are essentially a novelty — they are so strong and sweet in flavour that it’s hard to drink them to excess. They also don’t mix very well (although the orange flavour was delicious mixed with pineapple juice), so they have to be drunk neat, which might put some people off.

The upshot is that the two litres I have here will probably last me for quite a while. Nevertheless, they are an amusing novelty that I’m sure will make a positive contribution to my guests’ inebriation levels.

Food