Giffard Archives - First Pour Cocktails

Giffard Creme de Cacao Blanc

Posted on September 15, 2023September 11, 2023 by Nick

Chocolate Liqueurs run the gamut from clear and boozy to creamy and mild. The result makes planning your cocktails a bit of a trick. Add the wrong chocolate liqueur to a drink, and that clear white chocolate martini can end up cloudy or brown. Add cream to the wrong drink, and things can curdle. Once you get past just figuring out what liqueur you need, then you have to figure out which one doesn’t suck. In the long line of their liqueurs, we have never had issues with Giffard, so does their Giffard Creme de Cacao Blanc work for your cocktail needs, or is this a leftover tootsie roll in the liqueur aisle?

Giffard Creme de Cacao Blanc

Proof: 50 (25% A.B.V.)
Notes: Lactose free, Gluten free, Vegan, No preservative

Sight: Essentially clear, but highly viscous.

Smell: The nose has a mild to moderate burn, but is layered with milk chocolate bars, vanilla, and hints of tootsie roll. The chocolate notes seem layered and more than just one milk chocolate element. It has a mild earthy note.

Sip: Unsurprisingly it’s sweet, thick, and very smooth. The flavor milk chocolate bars mixes with vanilla, and has a creamy chocolate milk like texture. The touches of vanilla and white chocolate keep that tootsie roll note going a bit. Subtle dark chocolate notes are in the background.

Savor: The finish is smooth and sweet with plenty of chocolate hanging around.

Giffard Creme de Cacao Blanc is wonderfully chocolate laden, and delivers it with the required amount of sweetness. Although you wouldn’t want to sip on this straight (due to all the sugar), it’s clearly setup well for making drinks with. The flavors are thankfully very real, and avoid some of the artificialness you see in cheaper products.

In Cocktails

In a Grasshopper it adds a wonderfully chocolate background, and gives the mint a clever foil. It ends up rich and chocolaty without being overwhelming sweet. Similarly, Giffard plays particularly well in more complex applications, like the the 20th Century. The cacao element gives an earthiness without making the gin fight with the chocolate. This balance with the citrus shows how well it plays with other ingredients. It even works well in my mother’s chocolate martinis.

In Review – Giffard Creme de Cacao Blanc

Giffard Creme de Cacao Blanc is a wonderful choice for a creme de cacao, especially a white one, for your bar. The price point in the mid-to-high $20 range provides good value with lots of solid flavor. While you could go cheaper, you should prepare to taste more sugar and more alcohol. For these reasons, this is our current go to creme de cacao blanc.

Giffard Banane du Bresil

Posted on March 24, 2023February 14, 2023 by Nick

Most people don’t look to add a banana liqueur to their bar unless they either love bananas, or are planning on using it for something really specific. If you happen to be looking for a high quality banana liqueur, Giffard Banane du Bresil might be just the ticket. Made from slow macerated bananas mostly from Brazil, this banana liqueur is heavy on the banana notes and finished with just a touch of cognac. So does this hold up to the high standards of Giffard’s other products?

Giffard Banane du Bresil

Sight: A moderate gold with hints of copper.

Smell: The smell is sweet and initially stands out as a banana candy note. The smell is more dynamic though, giving way to overly ripe, mashed banana notes and a slight caramelization.

Sip: The sip starts sweet and has a correspondingly thick texture. The flavors of overripened mashed bananas bump up against candied banana notes. A subtle caramelized sugar flavor leans toward bananas foster. A range of other banana flavors flit in and out.

Savor: The candied banana carries over to the finish and has a subtle dried banana chip flavor.

Giffard Banane du Bresil is banana forward and does a good job of balancing real banana flavors and candied notes. The flavors here are obviously sweet, which is to be expected, but there’s complexity that underlies the liqueur. The different sugar notes bring depth and dimensions. The net effect is rather sweet to sip on its own, but it has enough character if you were to try to drink it straight that you wouldn’t feel overwhelmed with one note.

In Cocktails

There aren’t really standard classic cocktails that call for a banana flavor, but the Educated Barfly’s reader Chase Hoffman from Denver, was nice enough to contribute the Banana Farmer to the world. This riff on Planter’s Punch and Zombie ends up using almost an ounce of Giffard Banane du Bresil to make an amazing rum forward drink that does a slam dunk of caramelized banana flavor with underlying bruleed sugar. The falernum adds a beautiful spicing, and the lime comes to brighten the whole thing up. While not listed in the written recipe, you’ll find two dashes of angostura bitters in the video presentation of it. I recommend that you try it both ways to find your preference for spice level.

Banana Farmer

1 oz

Smith & Cross Rum

1 oz

Plantation 3 Star Rum

1 oz

Giffard Banane du Bresil

½ oz

Velvet Falernum

1 oz

Lime Juice

¾ oz

Pineapple Juice

2 Dashes

Angostura Bitters (Optional)

Combine all ingredients in a shaker tin. Add ice and shake. Strain into a Collins glass and fill with fresh pellet or crushed ice. Garnish with caramelized banana and 2 pineapple fronds.

If perhaps a Banana forward Zombie cousin isn’t your jam, we’ll talk about how this works in cocktails in general. To start with, we’ve found that the sweetness is strong enough to replace most one to one simple syrups, but with a strong caramelized banana flavor. This means you can use it in relatively small proportions to add a good amount of banana flavor, like by substituting it in an old fashioned. Doing so gives a subtle caramelized banana note that compliments Jim Beam’s peanut note.

In Review – Giffard Banane du Bresil

Giffard Banane du Bresil is a deliciously flavored with lots of different banana flavors and a good mix of sugars. It has depth, sweetness, and complexity that align well with it’s mid $20 price tag. Despite this, it’s definitely an expansion bottle or one that you target specific drinks you want to make with it. True banana fans should also consider trying a bottle, and spicing up their favorite cocktail with hint of banana.

Giffard Curacao Bleu

Posted on May 7, 2021May 4, 2021 by Nick

Blue curacao is not necessarily a required ingredient in your home bar. At its core, it’s orange liqueur with blue coloring added. That coloring is the core of its charm, giving drinks an electrically colorful charm. Blue Curacao’s troubles stem from low quality producers that make poor quality curacaos, with bitter, chemical flavors. Thankfully, Giffard isn’t a low quality producer. So does Giffard Curacao Bleu do it better?

Giffard Curacao Bleu

Sight: It is undeniably blue. Somewhere between cobalt and azure with a hint of teal.

Smell: A bright smell of freshly zested oranges ranging from clementines to tangerines floats up. There’s a compliment of some vanilla notes and a hint of powder sugar. A slight tang of alcohol exists as well.

Sip: Sweet and thick to start, it brings in a slightly sour, candied orange flavor. The cloying sweetness has a hint of vanilla and other tropical orange zest notes to it.

Savor: The ending is cloyingly sweet, but leaves a light to moderate lingering tropical orange flavor palate.

Why anyone would want to drink Giffard Curacao Bleu straight is not for me to ponder. Suffice it to say that unless you a fan of saccharinely sweet liqueurs that are primarily orange flavored, then you will very little here to enjoy on it’s own.

In Cocktails

Lest we be too hard on Giffard Curacao Bleu, as it works wonderfully in cocktails. The two things you want blue curacao to do well are:

Be Blue
Impart a lightly-tropical but ultimately orangey flavor into a cocktail.

The first two things it passes with flying colors. It is, in fact, blue. It also happens to be orange flavored. More importantly, it passes another unspoken rule, it doesn’t impart any strange cheap flavoring or chemical flavors. This last one is the kiss of death of most of the Windex colored liqueurs you see gracing the bottom shelf.

There is a third, semi-unspoken objective that blue curacao also has (which Giffard passes), which is to add sweetness. The third is obviously optional, but something that always needs to be considered when making drinks with any orange liqueur. Overall, even though Giffard’s blue curacao is sweet, it’s not overwhelmingly sweet, and thanks to that, it replaces well with 1:1 simple. As a result of its good behavior and modifier characteristics, we’ve used it in both our original Frankenstein and Slimer cocktails.

Giffard Curacao Bleu Overall

Giffard Curacao Bleu is somewhat more expensive than it’s competitors, ranging from the low to mid $20s. We feel that based on the smooth characteristics, natural flavors, and balanced sweetness that it’s one of the best blue curacao options out there, and highly recommend it for any bar looking to add a blue curacao to their cocktail kit.

Giffard Curacao Bleu Cocktails

Halloween Inspired Cocktails 2019 - Slimer — Slimer

Giffard Pêche De Vigne

Posted on August 9, 2020August 9, 2020 by Nick

For some liqueurs one is spoilt for choice. Look no further than the plethora of orange liqueurs in the market, and you’ll see a near saturation of similar products. Yet, for some liqueurs, there are relative few ways to go. Among them are most stone fruit liqueurs, like peach. Fortunately, Giffard is once again helping plug gaps in our bar with Giffard Pêche de Vigne

Giffard Pêche de Vigne

Translating to Peach of the Vineyard, Giffard infuses the peaches of France into their liqueur. While it sounds absolutely lovely, it’s always a question of if the liquid inside the bottle measures up to the story told. So does Giffard Pêche de Vigne impress?

Sight: Lightly golden, boarding on a chardonnay. Just plain peachy.

Smell: A beautiful mix of fresh macerated peaches and candied peach rings. There are some tangy notes of fresh, slightly under ripe peaches.

Sip: The start is viscous but bright. The flavor builds into a mix of candied peaches and fresh mashed peaches with their skins.

Savor: The ending sticks for a while and moves toward the candied side with those linger hints of fresh peach skin and a subtle, floral nuttiness.

Pêche de Vigne isn’t the most complicated liqueur, but what it tries to do, it does well. The balance of fresh peach and candied peach is easy going but enjoyable. The brightness also helps it to play well with cocktails, and the sweetness hides any edges. The relatively low alcohol also helps to keep the balance of the cocktail.

In Cocktails

Pêche de Vigne plays well various rums, making it a nice addition to Tiki drinks. It also has a nice a synergy with floral spirits and gins. As a result, we’ve found it to be a solid modifier for crafting with, and have used it in a number of our original cocktails.

Pêche de Vigne Overall

Giffard Pêche de Vigne is a great addition for those looking for a peach flavored liquor. The price is reasonable, and those who enjoy making tiki drinks will find places to slot this to add a twist to their drinks. While it’s by no means a must have, it certainly is one of our favorite bottles to play with, and we encourage others to try it.

Giffard Abricot Du Roussillon

Posted on May 15, 2019April 19, 2021 by Nick

Perhaps the first reason someone picks up a book on cocktails is to look at the amazing recipes contained within. When I first picked up a copy of Death & Co’s cocktail book, I turned right to the whiskey section. Then immediately realized that I couldn’t make anything in that section, or most of the other ones. It wasn’t for a lack of skill (although that would come), it was more for lack of ingredients.

Fortunately, a fair number of cocktail books contain sections with recommendations for different brands and liquors that they use in their cocktails. These offer a great starting point if you’re unfamiliar, and a great chance to compare if you happen to own multiple books. Over time, and with the purchase of a number of books, I began to realize that some brands are better than others. Among them is Giffard’s.

While we’ve tried a number of spirits, we generally gravitate toward Giffard as we’ve found everything from the Blue Curacao to the Vigne de Peché to be well-balanced, nuanced, and true to their names.

Giffard describes their Abricot du Roussillon as a premium liqueur, made from Rouges du Roussillon apricots macerated in neutral spirits and then sweetened with fresh apricot juice. True to form in the tasting notes, the flavors are balanced and fresh, and there’s a premium feel here we didn’t see in lower end Apricot Liqueur.

On Its Own

Giffard Abricot Du Roussillon has a delightful fresh apricot start to the nose. The smell is nuanced, picking up notes of dried and baked apricots, orange zest, and candied fruit notes. The palate is sweet, although not cloyingly so. The flavor is predominantly fresh apricot, but still picks up some of the dried and baked elements, along with touches of tangerine, allspice, and certain nuttiness. A mild astringency lingers with the sweetness of the finish.

It’s worth noting this flavor is distinctly apricot – you’d be unlikely to open this and think – wow, that’s peaches [or other miscellaneous stone fruit].

Giffard Abricot Du Roussillon – In Cocktails

I would be remiss to tell you that Apricot Liqueur is widely used in cocktails. In our perusal of several cocktail books in our collection, we yielded possibly a dozen recipes out of several hundred. That number trims down even further if you’re trying to find a cocktail that truly showcases apricot liqueur. That’s a shame too; at its best it adds a delightful fruitiness while giving a cocktail characteristics that surprise and often amazing people. Several of our guests after trying it, have been surprised at how much apricot flavor it imparts.

So what can you do with it?

Thanks to its pungent nature, Giffard Abricot Du Roussillon can be employed easily as a modifier. Adding a hint (read barspoon to quarter oz) to a Gin and Tonic, Manhattan, or Daiquiri can add a different dimension to a favorite drink. If you want to be more tailored, The Bitter Truth (who makes a competing product) offers a list of Apricot cocktails.

Their Apricot Lady really helps to show off the depth of flavor Giffard’s Abricot Du Roussillon has. The apricot comes through against the creaminess of the egg, and the orange amplifies with the rum. Simultaneously rich and refreshing, it’s a great choice to show off the liqueur.

Abricot Du Roussillon also plays well in Tiki Cocktails. One of the recipes we found is the Golden Gun from Smuggler’s Cove by Martin Cate [disclosure – this is an Amazon Affiliate link, First Pour Cocktails may receive a portion of any sale]. The play between the rums, apricot, and the citrus creates a beautifully balanced mix of tiki flavors. The apricot really shines through – playing off the brown sugar and molasses notes of the rums. The result is a simply sippable cocktail that’s perfect for spring or early fall.

The Final Word – Giffard Abricot Du Roussillon

There aren’t a ton of apricot liqueurs on the market, so most of the time your options will be limited. If you do have a choice, Giffard Abricot Du Roussillon is among the top we’ve tasted, being well balanced, nuanced, and true to the flavor of apricots.

Giffard Abricot Du Roussillon

Rating

Coming Soon!

Other’s Share Their Thoughts on Giffard Abricot Du Roussillon:

Tasting Notes:

Ann Marie: On the nose fresh apricot with a touch of fresh fruit tarts, hints of baked apricot, and orange. Taste was similar to fresh apricot – with a hint of nuttiness like the pit. A hint of allspice and orange with a pleasant sweetness.

Nick: The smell is of fresh cut apricots with a subtle bitterness and candy like notes. There are touches of dried apricot as well. On the palate there’s a mild astringent characteristic and a pleasant sweetness. Fresh apricot and a mild nuttiness come together with a hint of tangerine on the finish. The dried /cooked apricot characteristics come through well.