Fourteen years ago in a parking lot in the aptly named city of Lebanon, Tennessee, a gentleman who called himself Jellybean and claimed to have killed 26 people allowed me a swig of his homemade whiskey. His drink had a nose, palate and finish of ethanol. He may have forgotten to malt his grains, he may have been using an ill-proportioned still, or he may have been drinking ethanol.
Like Jellybean, I've always fancied myself as a boozemaker, but never had the skill or equipment to produce anything worth drinking. So imagine my delight when I tried infusing vodkas and found it as easy as stuffing something into a bottle and waiting until it tastes nice.
There are, as I write, bottles of homemade pepper vodka, perilla vodka and wasabi vodka on my coffee table. There's a hops vodka and a banana vodka on top of my fridge. There's a butter vodka in the fridge, a black truffle vodka on the sideboard and an ambergrease vodka on top of my wine cellar, but we'll come to that later.