Spirits | United States | Matchbook Distilling | Daytrip Blueberry Amaro

Daytrip Blueberry Amaro

NOTES

The process starts by treading the berries — and pitching yeast quickly. Blueberries are tricky: low in sugar and high in pH, they’re incredibly vulnerable to wild microbes. Timing is everything, and the process is fast; catching the fermentation early and punching down the cap of skins daily. When the wine reaches its peak — wildly aromatic, all gleaming color and intense fruit — it is fortified it to capture that moment in time.

The fortification blend is heady and complex. It’s a distilled botanical mix of yuzu, makrut lime leaf, cherry blossom, lemon peel, coconut, and cinnamon — all using their house-made, organic corn spirit. That base spirit starts with NY-grown corn, fermented and distilled on-site, then used to extract delicate aromatics from each ingredient.

For sweetness, a house-made syrup is added to the mix: cornflakes steeped in hot water and sugar, then blended with a whole pound of Madagascar vanilla beans from Rare Tea Cellar. The cereal adds toast and cream notes; the vanilla brings warmth, depth, and a certain indulgent softness. Together, they give Blueberry Daytrip a sweet edge that’s generous but not cloying.

To balance it all out, layers of bitter. Orris root, gentian root, and quassia bark lend structure — a musky, woody, fruit-skin kind of bitterness that lengthens the finish and pulls the sweetness back to earth.

The spirit is finished by cold-settling the amaro, dropping the temperature to encourage solids to fall out of suspension, and racking gently off the sediment. What’s left is a clean, vivid expression of summer’s end — just sweet enough, just bitter enough, deeply blue and wildly aromatic.