Summer in a glass

It's still not quite local strawberry season in Overcast, but when the first strawberries of the season showed up a few weeks ago in the grocery store, I had to get some for eating and some for booze.  This is probably my favorite of the liqueurs we've done so far, both because it was easiest and because it's retained the flavor of the fruit best.  (We've done blueberry, orange, banana, and fig besides this).  I didn't really measure, just putting enough hulled and halfed strawberries to loosely fill a quart mason jar, with enough vodka to cover.  They sat for about two weeks, turning into the horrible pale alien fruit things you see above.

With just draining, the yield was only about 2 cups/12 ounces, but squeezing the strawberries in a cheesecloth bag brought the yield up by half again to about 3 cups.  Since it was still at this point basically pink vodka, we added a little more than a cup of 1-1 simple syrup and a little lemon to round out the taste and dilute it a little. Verdict:  It's basically a perfect little sip of summer.  I'm thinking there might be strawberry mint spritzer in my future.