Make Your Own · The Components
The Ingredients
The components every recipe assumes you have on hand — syrups, shrubs, infusions, essences. Each with its own method, yield, and the drinks that depend on it.
The components every recipe assumes you have on hand — syrups, shrubs, infusions, essences. Each with its own method, yield, and the drinks that depend on it.
Most cocktail recipes spend a sentence on "honey syrup" or "rich demerara" and assume you'll work out the rest. This is the rest. Small components, made at home, kept in the fridge — and the recipes they unlock.
Sugar and water in equal parts. The most basic sweetener in the bar — and the difference between a clean drink and one that grits at the bottom.
Demerara sugar dissolved 2 : 1 with water. A deeper, molasses-leaning syrup for old-fashioneds, tiki, and anywhere you want body.
Honey thinned 3 parts to 1 with warm water. The only way honey behaves in a cold shaker — and the move that makes a real Bee's Knees possible.
Honey, warm water, and fresh ginger steeped together. The defining ingredient of Sam Ross's Penicillin — and the bar's best winter syrup.
Pure cane sugar dissolved rich, 2 : 1, the way the French West Indies sweetens its rum. Heavier and more molasses-leaning than simple — and the soul of a Ti Punch.
Cinnamon sticks simmered into simple syrup. The warm-spice shortcut behind Elusive Dreams and a run of modern tiki riffs.
Fresh passion fruit pulp cooked down with sugar. A modern tiki staple — and a different thing from the unsweetened purée some recipes call for instead.
Fresh ginger simmered into plain simple syrup. Sharper than its honey-sweetened cousin — for drinks that want ginger's heat without a floral backbone.
Pineapple juice and trim reduced with sugar. Concentrated pineapple flavor without the extra water a straight juice pour adds.
A real vanilla bean steeped into simple syrup. The quiet half of Don the Beachcomber's secret house allspice-and-vanilla blend.
Strained watermelon juice and sugar, three to one by weight, stirred cold. Heat is what turns watermelon into candy.
Sugar, mango puree and water blended cold, corrected with citric acid. Death & Co's formula, and the body behind the Dragon's Dream.
Brandied or maraschino cherries simmered down with their own liquid. Cherry as a real mixed-in flavor, not just a garnish.
Peel oils, citric acid, water — and one lemon's juice stretches like four. Dave Arnold's chemistry, popularized by Nickle Morris.
Lime's acid profile is more complex than lemon's. A 2 : 1 citric : malic blend rebuilds its pH; the peel carries the aroma.
Lime juice, peel, and sugar cooked into a syrup that keeps. The argument with fresh juice that makes a Gimlet a Gimlet.
Pomegranate juice, sugar, and orange flower water. Nothing like the red corn syrup at the supermarket — and the reason classic recipes that call for it work.
Almonds steeped into a milk, then sweetened with sugar and lifted with orange flower water. The defining ingredient of a tiki canon's worth of drinks.
Lime zest, ginger, clove, and almond infused into rum and sweetened into a cordial. The spiced backbone under a Zombie or a Nuclear Daiquiri.
Allspice berries steeped in overproof rum and sweetened into a warm, clove-and-nutmeg cordial. The spice note under a Rum Barrel or a Doctor Funk.
Granny Smith apples and sugar snap peas juiced, clarified with a pectic enzyme, then sweetened and re-acidified. Clear enough to carbonate hard.
Grapefruit peel and cracked coriander seed cured in sugar under vacuum for a day, then let down with water and two acids. All of the peel oil, none of the juice.
Strawberries, sugar, and apple cider vinegar steeped overnight. The brightest summer cocktail modifier you can make for ten dollars.
Darker and more tannic than strawberry. Built for bourbon highballs and the cool nights that come with the late season.
Fresh cider reduced and sharpened with cider vinegar. The autumn shrub — built for bourbon, rye, and apple brandy.
Aged and overproof rum shaken with melted coconut oil, frozen, and filtered. Coconut flavour and a silkier pour, with none of the fat left behind.
Gin washed with a full-bodied extra virgin olive oil, then frozen and filtered cold. Silky texture and a green, peppery note under the botanicals.
Bourbon washed with fat rendered from smokehouse bacon, then frozen and filtered cold. Smoke and cured pork carry through the spirit without any grease.
Plymouth gin held at 65°C with toasted coconut chips and cacao butter for an hour. A steep and a fat wash running in the same bag.
Orange essential oil dissolved into Everclear with a propylene glycol carrier, decanted into a 30 mL atomizer. Fresh peel oil, all year, in two sprays.
Food-grade lemon essential oil in the same atomizer base. The workhorse of the kit — for every drink that finishes with a lemon-peel twist.
Pink grapefruit essential oil, atomized. More aromatic per drop than orange or lemon — one spray often does the job of two.