— Hey y’all. Remember when I posted this? Well that ended up turning into a little something I call Bacon Habenero-Infused Vodka. I didn’t end up using all of the peppers, but I did use the majority of them.

After cooking a few slices of bacon, and slicing the peppers but maintaining the spines and seeds as much I could, I patted down the bacon to get as much grease off (you’ll never get it all off) and infused the vodka for a few days with it. On the day that I was going to present it to my chili-head friend as his birthday gift, I took the the vodka out, washed down all of the bacon and chilies to get them as clean of fat as possible, and then I filtered the vodka through a coffee filter I screwed on top of a mason jar.

You can see there’s plenty of fat that needs to be taken out of the vodka. The filtering is definitely a must.

Yeah, it ain’t pretty, but if you like heat, you’d love the stuff. It got passed around Wayne’s birthday and pretty much every had a taste of it. Reactions went from Wayne thinking it was the best thing he’s ever drank, to “Hey, that’s got some heat, but that’s not bad” to “HOLY SHIT MY MOUTH IS ON FIRE”. Haha.

Last minute I tossed the chilies and bacon back in so it looked great for presentation.

I’m sure you could put this stuff to good use of than drinking it straight. Maybe a spicy chocolate martini or, while they aren’t my thing, a pretty killer Bloody Mary.