Colin Joliat
Green Skittles Vodka lets everyone know you’re not Irish but can drink like you are.
I have no idea if the Irish celebrate St. Paddy’s Day or not. There are as many articles saying they don’t as there are saying you can’t beat Dublin on March 17th. To be honest, I don’t care either. What’s important to me is making the faux celebration as entertaining as possible.
WARNING: Because it’s green, your friends will think this vodka is a mixed drink. They will most certainly poor the vodka on ice and take a sip only to declare that it’s terrible. Well, they’re drinking straight vodka, so of course it is. Mix it with Sprite or lemonade, and you’ve got yourself a party.
All you need to make Skittles Vodka is Skittles, vodka, and a Brita pitcher. Pretty short grocery list, right? It doesn’t even matter what vodka you use because you’re going to be packing it with sugar and green apple. I could have sworn green Skittles used to be lime, but the newfangled bags are green apple. Luckily the “Orchards” variety still has the lime, so I went with both. I also threw in a bottle of orange because my wife is a Protestant.
The toughest part about this is sorting the Skittles. If you have interns, this would be a perfect team-building exercise for them. You only need the green ones, so for the love of Tito don’t eat those while separating. If you’re color blind, I’m sorry. You probably shouldn’t have tried my moonshine recipe.
I funneled the green Skittles from 3 big bags into two water bottles using a makeshift paper funnel. The last thing you want to do after all that work sorting is waste precious Skittles.
Fill the water bottles with vodka and close them. Shake it like a salt shaker and/or Polaroid picture. Leave the bottle on its side and come back and vigorously shake it again every 10 minutes or so.
After a half hour all the color will be stripped from the Skittles and a decent amount of sugar will have dissolved. There’s absolutely no reason to let them dissolve entirely, so anyone saying you should let it soak for 24 hours is a sugar addict and needs help.
Now comes the part that caused all the problems when I first did this 5 years ago – filtering. I tried coffee filters, paper towel, and cheese cloth. None of them worked well. Meanwhile, a Brita pitcher had been sitting there the entire time. I don’t know why no one has used one before, but it was the answer to all my problems.
At first it looks like the filter is going to strip the color, but after the first ounce the green starts flowing like a river of clovers. You may need to agitate the vodka up top a few times after a sugar wall forms on the filter, and it will run through slower than normal, but a little patience will yield a nearly full bottle of Skittles vodka without much effort.
