Making glögg

Glögg is a Swedish style of mulled wine; it is standard to have around xmas time.

You can make glögg with a lot of alcohol, some alcohol, or boil for 20-40 minutes to remove the vast majority of alcohol. Soaking spices in alcohol is an important step to extract flavor, but you can boil away the alcohol itself in a later part of the process.

A rule of thumb for alcohol removal is that 1.5-2% alcohol dissipates for every minute of boiling.

Below is a quote from some hobbyist study published in a journal for medical doctors during xmas time one year; I’ve lost the source but you can probably find it by searching the Swedish wording.

En kompletterande tidsstudie med 20 procents alkoholblandning visade att förlusten av alkohol var ganska linjär under 5 minuter, vilket skulle innebära att endast 1,5–2 procent av alkoholen i vin försvinner för varje minuts kokning.

Translated by me:

An additional time study with a 20% alcohol mixture showed that the loss of alcohol was relatively linear during 5 minutes, which should indicate that only 1.5-2 procent of alcohol in wine dissipates for every minute of boiling.

Below are the instructions I wrote on making glögg on a private community forum that is defunct but which I luckily saved a screenshot of.

By the way you definitely want to taste and re-taste while boil-simmering in the step where sugar is added. Otherwise you will end up with hecking strong glögg!

Enjoy!