You can make our beautiful Skittles Vodka in red, white and blue colors for US Independence Day! All you is a bag of the America Mix Skittles and a bottle of vodka and a few supplies.

Except for the vodka, everything you need for this can be bought online from Amazon and delivered! That’s right – you don’t have to leave your couch until the box arrives at your front door.

You also make it at home, with minimal getting up from the couch. If you’re feeling really adventurous, you can go out into the backyard to enjoy it on Independence Day.

Related: Fourth of July Cocktails

The “America Mix” is a special collection of Skittles that come in five different colors: two shades of red, one shade of white and two shades of blue.

The flavors are delicious, as you would expect – raspberry and strawberry for the red, blackberry and wild berry for the blue, and something called “yumberry” for the white.

You make this exactly the way you make our usual Skittles Vodka, but we’ll go over the instructions on this page.

This is a fun and easy project, but it does take about 24 hours to make. Be sure to give yourself enough time.

The end result tastes almost exactly like the candy flavors, except with a vodka “kick.” If you like the individual candy flavor, you’ll like the infusion.

Yes, you can also use light rum or any other white liquor to infuse these, but they will change the flavor profile considerably. Sometimes a particular candy flavor and a particular bottle of rum will clash and make a somewhat medicinal taste.

Vodka is always the safe choice. To see if you think rum or another spirit will work, chew up a few candies (of one particular color and flavor) in your mouth, then toss back a drink of the rum, swirl it all around in your mouth and see what you think.

You’ll need:

One 750ml bottle of vodka. This is a normal sized bottle of vodka. We’ve had good results with Svedka and Smirnoff, and both are affordably priced.

One 14 oz bag of America Mix Skittles. These are available on Amazon.

Five 8.5 ounce flasks or bottles like these gorgeous and well-made Bormioli Rocco flasks from Amazon that we’ve used for years.

You’ll also need a few things you probably already have around the kitchen.

• Five empty lidded jars (canning jars or old, thoroughly cleaned condiment jars are great) or plastic water bottles
• A funnel like these from OXOl
• Optional – bowls for separating the candies (you can just sort them in piles if you prefer)
• A measuring cup
• Cheesecloth
• Coffee filters.

And beware: this project can get messy if something spills. So unless you’re doing it all on a countertop that doesn’t stain and is easy to clean, you should probably spread some newspaper or freezer paper on your surface.

Step 1: Sort the Candies

Like the standard bag of Skittles, the America Mix comes with five colors and flavors of candy. With the normal bag, we always make five colors and flavors of Skittles vodka from each different color of candy.

But for this project, we really only want vodka in red, white and blue. So when you sort out the candies, go ahead and group both shades of blue together and both shades of red together.

You want 70 candies of each color. That’s going to be mixed with 7 ounces of vodka, and you’ll end up with about 7.5 ounces of infused Skittles vodka.

You could also just use one shade of blue candies and one shade of red, if you prefer. There will be enough candy to do that.

Step 2: Put the candies into jars

Put the sorted candies into three glass or plastic jars or bottles. We used Ball wide-mouth canning jars and they worked very well.

Step 3: Add the vodka

Now you’re going to pour about 7 ounces of vodka in over the top of the candies. Do not just fill up the container you put the candies in!

No matter what container you’re using, it’s almost surely a lot more than 7 ounces. Just measure your 7 ounce pour in a measuring cup before adding it to the candy.

Step 4: Shake, shake, shake Senora!

Now it’s time to shake the infusion (and no, you don’t need to be Senora, but that’s a reference to a great Harry Belafonte song to sing while you’re doing it).

You want to shake each infusion thoroughly for a good 30-60 seconds, and you’ll have to do this every few hours over the rest of the day. Some people report great results from putting the infusions in the dishwasher to give them a good shaking.

But just shaking them 4-6 times over the next few hours will do the job. The candies will slowly break down over time and it will all meld into one lovely infusion.

Step 5: Strain the mixture

At this point in the process, you’ll find there’s a layer of thick unappealing gunk in each of your infusions. That’s okay – we’re going to strain it out.

After doing this a few times, we’ve found the best way to strain it is through 2 layers of cheese cloth inside a coffee filter, and those links will take you to exactly the ones we’ve used.

But some readers report that just coffee filters worked best for them, or some other combination, so feel free to experiment. We think maybe it depends on the brands of everything from the vodka to the coffee filters.

This method strains out everything in one pass and doesn’t take forever. You can set this up any way you want, but we suggest this set up:

• Put a funnel in a measuring cup
• Put the coffee filter inside the funnel
• And the cheesecloth inside the coffee filter
• Pour the vodka infusion slowly through your filter

You can feast your eyes on this mad scientist contraption in this photo from the original Skittles Vodka Infusion:

It’s not quite like making moonshine out behind the woodshed, but we try to keep things interesting for you.

Step 6: Chill before serving

The final step is optional, but we recommend chilling your Independence Day Skittles Vodka infusions before serving them. Just because vodka tastes better chilled.

You can put them in your freezer for a few hours or overnight. These are very strong on their own – more or less full strength vodka.

How to serve

Because these taste like the Skittles they were made from, and all the flavors in the America Mix are some form of berry or another, these infusions all taste like variations on a berry theme.

And berry is delicious, so you can certainly drink them alone, and they will taste good. But you can also:

• Mix them with clear lemon lime soda, which adds a nice citrus zing to the berry flavors
• Mix them with any La Croix soda or sparking water you like
• Add some white grapefruit juice to cut the sweetness and dilute the alcohol a little.
• Spike beer with them because beer with berry flavoring is great
• Just serve them over ice to keep them cold and water them down slightly over time

You get the idea. There are a lot of ways to enjoy these. And if you’re looking to pair them with food for a get-together, check out this collection of Fourth of July Recipes!

Happy Independence Day!