Pomegranate liqueur, part II

day two of this recipe

results of day one, having waited two weeks

3/4 sugar
3/8 c water

lots of paper towels and coffee filters
a couple bowls and a strainer
one large (eg 1.5 quart = 6 cup) glass jar

Set up a strainer over a bowl. Line it with a paper towel and slowly start pouring the pomegranate stuff through it. When it starts draining slowly, stop pouring, wait for the remaining liquid to go through (and/or squeeze it a bit to help it through), change the paper towel for a fresh one, and continue. When you're down to the seeds and pulp, give it a good squeeze inside the paper towel to remove most of the liquid.

Now move the strainer over another bowl, and repeat the paper towel filtration procedure. Move the strainer back over the first bowl, and filter through coffee filters. You can only add a little bit of pomegranate stuff to each coffee filter, and it takes a long time for it to drain through anyway, so this part took me a couple hours. Luckily, you don't have to be standing there watching it, so you can do other things (make lunch, blog, make the simple syrup by boiling together the sugar and water, etc) and just check on it every couple minutes.

I ended up with 3 2/3 c liquid at the end of all this filtering, which means I lost 1/3 c along the way--not too bad. It's still very cloudy, but I think that's fine. Put the liquid in your big jar, add the (slightly cooled) simple syrup, seal, and put in the pantry to age for a couple weeks. You want just one large jar for this step, and you don't want to disturb it while it's aging, because you want the cloudy particulate matter to sink to the bottom of the jar where it will be easier for you to discard it on day three.