Preserve the exotic taste and aroma of the lychee fruit, using this time-tested and treasured family recipe for a sweet and refreshing drink.

Time: 5/5
Stick it in a cupboard and come back next month.

Effort: 2/5
Just a few steps more than washing and peeling some fruit.

Boozy Blues

I love lychees. The artificial flavouring you might find in jellies and drinks just can’t compare to the fresh, in-season fruit. If you’ve never had it, it tastes like something in between a grape, a pear and a peach, plus a sprinkle of rose water.

That’s the thing though. Unlike some fruits that are grown in greenhouses and all around the world, Lychees are only in season around June. I gorge myself on lychee for a month out of every year, and then eagerly await next year’s season.

Fortunately, there’s a way to preserve and enjoy the flavour of peak season lychee, and that’s by making a liqueur with them using double-distilled Chinese rice wine. It’s basically the same technique as my grandmother’s homemade Umeshu plum liqueur, and I learned it from her too.

(Coincidentally, lychee season follows right after Ume season so during some years we make batches of each back to back.)

2025 was a wonderful season for lychee. The fruits were large, plump and juicy, and the harvest was so bountiful that lychees went for really cheap and in huge quantities at the markets. I probably polished off 4 or 5lbs of fresh fruit over the month of May before I went and bought even more towards the end of the harvest for this recipe.

Of course, you can make lychee liqueur with any liquor you like, as long as it has a high enough alcohol content to preserve the fruit. Something with a neutral taste like vodka would be a decent substitute, although you may want to water it down a bit before consumption to fully enjoy the aromas.

In the same vein, you should sweeten your lychee liqueur to taste. I find myself adding 100-200g of sugar per 1000ml of rice wine, but it depends on both the natural sweetness of the fruit and the ratio of fruit to liquor. As no two batches of fruit are exactly the same, you will need to taste and adjust the sugar level towards the end. Tasting is a very pleasant process, so I’m not complaining.

It will take at least a month of leaving the lychee in the liquor in a cool dark place to extract flavour and allow the alcohol to mellow out. Once that’s done I like to serve lychee liqueur neat, at room temperature. You may want to try adding a little bit of soda water for a more refreshing drink, but in my opinion it’s best to keep things simple and enjoy the aroma of the lychee fruit at its purest. The individual fruits also absorb a lot of alcohol, and turn into fun little boozy fruit shots.

This was my second year making lychee liqueur myself, and one way in which my method differed from my grandmother’s is that I simplified the process. Grandma steams the fruits for a couple of minutes before adding the rice wine, but I’ve found that step unnecessary. I just add the rice wine after washing, peeling and deseeding the lychee, and the end product is indistinguishable in terms of flavour and shelf life.

It’s a good reminder that tradition is a wealth of knowledge, but it’s still worth examining and experimenting to extract the wisdom therein. Grandma steams her lychees because that’s how she learned it, but she doesn’t know why. Maybe there used to be a good reason for it, but contexts change and I believe that at the end of the day it’s the empirical results that matter.

In this case, the empirical result is delicious, delicious lychee liqueur. Let’s get on with the recipe.

(Want more recipes handed down from my grandmother? Check out these savoury glutinous rice dumplings called Zongzi, as well as tips for making them right the first time as a beginner.)

Posts since the last recipe that was actually served with rice: 1

Dramatis Personae

• 3lbs lychees
• 900ml double-distilled Chinese rice wine
• Sugar to taste

That’s it! Feel free to scale the recipe up or down, but keep the ratio of fruit to liquor pretty high.

Executive summary

1. Thoroughly clean all utensils and containers.
2. Wash, peel and de-seed all the lychees.
3. Put all the lychee flesh into a glass vessel, then pour in the rice wine.
4. Close off the container, and leave in a cool dark place for at least a month.
5. Sweeten to taste. Add sugar by bit, allowing it to dissolve and redistribute overnight.
6. Serve at room temperature.

Play by Play

Always wash your lychees! A lot of dirt settles onto the little spines on the skin. This is the water after the first rinse. I’m going to rinse them a second time.

This is how I like to peel lychees. Pull a chunk of skin off the top by digging under the stem with my thumb, peel the skin off circumferentially around halfway down the fruit, then pop the flesh out with a gentle squeeze.

After the lychees are peeled, the best way to de-seed them is to push the bottom of the seed out through the top, holding the fruit like a syringe and pushing with your thumb.

Rinse and repeat. I like to peel the fruit over the plastic bag that it came in, which makes for much easier cleanup.

Next, get the lychee and the Chinese rice wine into the glass jar. After this, I transferred the whole thing to a cool and dark kitchen cabinet.

This is late June, or after a month in the cabinet. Not much has changed appearance-wise, except that the lychee shrank a bit from the alcohol drawing out some of the juice. Here’s when I start to add a bit more sugar every day, tasting as I go until I am happy with it.

And that’s it! Just in time to bring to a party, as a personal gift to send a good friend off for a year-long trip. Ganbei!

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