Liqueur

Flavour on its own does not make a liqueur. Regulators generally set a minimum sugar content and a minimum strength, and a flavoured spirit falling below the sugar line has to be sold as something else, which is why a dry flavoured gin and a sweet gin liqueur sit in different categories rather than side by side. Sugar is not only there for taste either. It carries flavour, gives the liquid weight in the mouth, and keeps an opened bottle stable far longer than a wine would manage.

Creme de cassis, creme de menthe and creme de cacao contain no cream at all. The term signals a heavier sugar loading than an ordinary liqueur, thick enough to coat the inside of the glass, with the fruit or flavour named after it. Cream liqueurs are a separate thing entirely: real dairy cream emulsified into a spirit base, often whisky, rum or brandy. The two terms look almost identical in a recipe and are not interchangeable.

Marula fruit has given South Africa a liqueur style of its own, usually built as a cream liqueur with a soft caramel and stone-fruit character. Van der Hum is the older local style, a Cape naartjie peel liqueur traditionally based on brandy and spiced with cardamom and nutmeg, which puts it nearer an orange liqueur than anything creamy. Both turn up in baking as often as in a glass. The naartjie style will stand in for an orange liqueur in most cocktails, and it shifts the drink in a way worth doing deliberately rather than by accident.

Sugar and alcohol preserve, so an opened bottle holds up for a year or more if it is sealed and out of the light. Cream liqueurs are perishable and carry a best-before date, usually a couple of years from bottling. Egg and fresh-juice styles are perishable too, so check the bottle rather than assume.

They keep better cold, and the bottle carries the producer's own storage guidance, which is the instruction to follow. A cream liqueur is an emulsion, so heat and repeated swings in temperature can split it or leave it grainy.

Substitute by role rather than by name. Orange liqueurs are largely interchangeable in a sour, though the drier ones need a little more sugar somewhere else in the glass. Coffee liqueurs differ mostly in sweetness. Herbal and bitter liqueurs are the difficult ones, because the recipe is usually built around that particular bitterness, and swapping it gives you a different drink rather than a worse one.