Jenny from Winchester was given some homemade Irish Cream containing raw eggs for Christmas and she wants to know how long it will keep in the refrigerator.

It depends on how much alcohol is in the mixture. I found a number of recipes on the Web and they call for somewhere between 20 and 50 percent whiskey, depending on the recipe. If the whiskey used is 100 proof then it’s 50 percent alcohol.

Assuming a 100 proof whiskey, then a mixture with 20 percent whiskey is 10 percent alcohol and should probably be drunk within a week. At 50 percent whiskey the mixture is 25 percent alcohol and will probably keep for months if tightly sealed. The point is that even the yeast that produces alcohol can’t survive in an environment that’s more than 20 percent alcohol, and none of the common food pathogens can survive even 20 percent.

Sorry for getting technical, but I thought that was better than just saying, “It depends.”

Chef Kevin