Pistachio Liqueur: What It Is, How to Drink It & How Much Pistachio Is In It

Pistachio liqueur is Sicily's contribution to the after-dinner drinks cabinet: sweet, pale green, served cold in small glasses. It comes in two quite different styles, and knowing which one you are buying matters, because they behave differently in a glass and differ by more than ten percentage points of alcohol.

The two styles

Crema di pistacchio is the traditional Sicilian one. It is a cream liqueur — milk, cream and sugar with pistachio paste stirred through — so it is thick, opaque, mild and only around 16 to 17% ABV. That is wine strength. It pours like a thin custard and tastes closer to a dessert than a drink.

Clear infused pistachio liqueur macerates the nuts in spirit rather than blending them into dairy. The result is thinner, less sweet, more obviously alcoholic, and stronger — the best-known international bottling sits at 28% ABV. It survives better in cocktails, where dairy can curdle against citrus.

If a recipe calls for "pistachio cream liqueur" it means the first. If it just says "pistachio liqueur" and the drink also contains cream, either will work.

Where it comes from

Bronte, on the slopes of Etna, is the centre of it. The town's pistachios account for the large majority of Italian production and carry a protected designation, and effectively every Sicilian pistachio product — paste, cream, gelato, liqueur — traces back there or claims to.

That claim is worth a little scepticism on a supermarket shelf. Bronte pistachios are expensive and the yield is small; a cheap bottle labelled with the town's name is not necessarily made from its nuts.

Read the ingredients

This is the part worth slowing down for.

A representative Sicilian crema lists, in order: water, cream, milk, sugar, glucose syrup, alcohol, milk protein, pistachio at a minimum of 3%, flavourings, and food dyes.

Three per cent. The rest of the green, and much of the flavour, comes from elsewhere. That is not a scandal — it is how cream liqueurs are built, and the same is true of many nut liqueurs — but it does explain why two bottles at the same price can taste completely different, and why the vivid ones are often the least nutty.

Better producers use considerably more nut and skip the colouring, and you can usually tell by looking: real pistachio paste gives a dull, brownish, olive-tinted green, not a bright one. It is the same story as the food colouring in pistachio pudding mix and the dash of blue curaçao bartenders add to a pistachio martini. Pistachio's true colour photographs badly, so the industry corrects it almost everywhere.

How to drink it

Cold, and in a small glass. Sicilians keep the crema in the fridge and often in the freezer — the sugar content stops it freezing solid and it pours thick and very cold, which suits it.

Beyond that:

Poured straight over pistachio gelato or plain vanilla, where it does the job a sauce would. Stirred into an espresso, which cuts the sweetness usefully. Splashed into whipped cream for a trifle or a tiramisu. Or shaken with vanilla vodka into a pistachio martini, which is where most bottles in the UK and US end up.

It is too sweet to drink in quantity and too weak to treat as a spirit. One small glass is the format.

Keeping it

The cream styles need the fridge once opened and do not last indefinitely — six months is a fair working limit, and they will separate or turn before they turn dangerous. Give the bottle a shake and a sniff.

Clear infused liqueurs have no dairy in them and keep more or less forever at room temperature, though they taste better cold.

Making your own

You can approximate the clear style at home: steep 150 g of shelled, lightly crushed unsalted pistachios in 500 ml of vodka for two to three weeks, shaking occasionally, then strain through muslin and sweeten to taste with a sugar syrup. It will be pale gold rather than green, because there is no colouring in it.

The crema style is harder to get right — emulsifying dairy and alcohol without it splitting is the whole skill of a cream liqueur — and a homemade one has a short fridge life. Blending pistachio paste into condensed milk and vodka gets you a drinkable approximation to use within a fortnight.