making homemade extracts. every detail explained!

The basics of making homemade extracts. What to look out for when choosing a liquor, whether you need to purchase special bottles, and other tidbits to keep in mind as you design and create your own extracts at home. (Extra notes on non-alcoholic extracts are below.)
The main takeaway is that making extracts is an art, so recipes are only part of the equation when it comes to homemade extracts.

0:00 intro
0:14 vanilla extract update & quick recipe
1:07 about vanilla beans
2:17 choosing the liquor
3:02 making alcohol-free extracts
4:08 dark vs transparent bottles
4:48 extract recipes
6:56 steeping & straining

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Links mentioned

Vanillapura experiment with different alcohol percentages:
https://www.vanillapura.com/blogs/ext...

Vanilla blind taste-off including artificial vanilla:
https://www.cooksillustrated.com/arti...

Serious Eats vanilla taste-off:https://www.seriouseats.com/taste-tes...

Glycerin acts a preservative at a concentration at or above 50%:
https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...

Appendix on non-alcoholic extracts

It's important to note that, while glycerin is antimicrobial, it is not antimicrobial in the same way that alcohol is. Alcohol is toxic to microorganisms because it denatures and kills them. In the preservation of solids, glycerin preserves by simply sealing out oxygen and slowly drawing away moisture.
My concern with using glycerin in extracts that have non-dry ingredients would be this: since the glycerin will be drawing water out, it's possible that this significant additional moisture could push the glycerin concentration below 50%. Concentrations below 50% have the potential to actually promote microbial growth instead of hindering it.