How To Make Mamajuana

Last February we went to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic and picked up a bottle of herbs to create Mamajuana. Having had many varieties of Mamajuana while in the Dominican my wife Jennifer and I thought it would be a worthy thing to play with at home. Plus, you can buy just the herbs in the bottle without alcohol so bringing it back to the country is pretty easy.

So, how do you take it to the next level of making mamajuana? First, we had to prepare the bottle, which required us to “rinse” the bottle with red wine and let it sit for a few weeks then dump it out. This removes a lot of the tart bitterness from the fresh herbs within the bottle and prepares it for real product.

The folks in the Dominican said it was simply red wine, honey and rum (specifically a Dominican rum of course). You can build any adjustment in ratio that you want, but we did about 1/3 bottle of red wine, a few ounces of honey and topped the rest off with rum. We used dominican rum for our first build but next time we may go with a dark rum and see how that tastes.

You can re-use your bottle of mamajuana over and over again, they say for up to 15-years. It ages and gets better as you go (and a bit less bitter each time) so go ahead and enjoy. You can probably find a bottle of the herbs online and then repeat our recipe build.