Once you’ve mastered the basics of cocktails and you’ve learned a selection of classic recipes, one way to add a personal twist to your drinks is by incorporating homemade extras. Although you probably won’t be distilling your own spirits at home (certainly not legally in most places) you absolutely can easily make a variety of tinctures, syrups, infusions, and more to add to cocktails.
This is a great way to start your own experiments rather than directly following a recipe. Although trying to come up with a recipe from scratch is challenging, it’s a much more approachable task to take an existing drink and add your own twist to it. And adding small amounts of powerful flavors is a very effective way of making a familiar drink that you know you’ll enjoy, but making your own version of it.
We’re taking you on a whistle-stop tour of a few of the additions you might want to have on hand for your home bar and giving some examples of drinks to try each one in to get you inspired to try out a few tests of your own.
Bitters and tinctures
The bottles of commercially made bitters that you can buy either from established brands or smaller craft brands can have all sorts of uses. Not only are they useful in cocktails, but you can even use them in cooking or in non alcoholic drinks as well. A little dash of chocolate bitters in a pot of chili or a drop of Peychaud’s in a mug of hot chocolate can add a really interesting depth of flavor.
It is absolutely possible to make your own bitters at home, although this can be rather complex as many of the bitters styles that you already know can use very extensive lists of sometimes obscure ingredients. But you can start off by making a simpler style of
Bitters and tinctures are essentially the same in that they are small quantities of highly flavorful alcohols, but while
The basis for these is high-proof alcohol, such as Everclear or high-proof vodka. Anything around 75% ABV will work, as the high level of alcohol makes it extremely effective at extracting flavors from other ingredients. You’re going to use the spirit to make a very strong infusion, which can then be added to drinks in small quantities.
One of my favorites is a black pepper tincture.
- Just take a small mason jar or jam jar and fill up the bottom with around a centimeter of whole black peppercorns.
- Then, pour over the alcohol, adding just enough to cover the peppercorns.
- Seal the lid and give it a good shake, then leave it to infuse for around 10 to 14 days. Ideally, pop it somewhere cool and dark during this time, and give it a shake whenever you remember.
- Once it’s ready, strain the peppercorns through cheesecloth. The tincture should be kept in a small bottle, preferably dark in color, to help the flavors last longer.
Now, you can add your tincture to any drink you like, though you’ll want to use no more than 5 ml at a time because its flavor will be so strong. I love adding the pepper tincture to vegetal gin and tonics or to bloody Marys for an extra hit. The black pepper adds a note of heat and spice that tickles the back of the throat—it’s a love-it-or-hate-it sort of sensation, but it adds a note of interest to even fruity drinks.
If black pepper isn’t your style, you could follow exactly the same process with star anise to add a mulled wine-like quality to your drinks or use coriander seeds for a more gentle, warm note. You can also combine multiple different spices, just as you’d make spice blends for cooking. My experience has been that dried spices tend to work better for tinctures as they last longer and don’t go bad, but you could certainly try with fresh ingredients like ginger or citrus peel as well.
Home-made syrups
If you want to add the flavor of soft fruit to your drinks, though, there’s another more popular method: making a syrup. Sugar can be effective at extracting flavors just like alcohol, and while tinctures work well for spices as they are dry, syrups work great for ingredients that benefit from the addition of sugar.
The typical way to make a syrup is to mix sugar and water in a pan and heat it to melt the sugar, then add your fruit of choice. The warm syrup will extract the flavors from the fruit, and you can strain it using cheesecloth once it has cooled. However, the heating process can sometimes do strange things to fruits, and it can be a bit of a hassle. An alternative option, which is great for fruits with high water content like strawberries, is to cut the fruit into small pieces, put it into a bowl, and then cover it with white sugar. Cover the bowl and leave it out for around an hour, and something remarkable happens: the sugar extracts most of the water from the fruits, causing it to dissolve, and a beautiful syrup forms at the bottom of the bowl. Remove the chunks of fruit, and you get an incredibly fresh syrup that requires no heating or equipment at all.
Once you’ve made your syrup, you should keep it in the fridge, as it will go bad after a couple of weeks. Some people recommend pouring a shot of high-proof alcohol or even just regular vodka into the syrup before storing it, as the alcohol is supposed to help kill off bacteria. However, it’s often useful to have syrups on hand as a non-alcoholic option for mixing with tonic water, for example, so this is optional.
With homemade fruit syrup, it’s amazing how different drinks will taste. The strawberry daiquiri, for example, has a reputation for being overly sweet and full of artificial flavors, but if you make one using homemade strawberry syrup and a few fresh mint leaves, then I guarantee you’ll think differently about this drink.
Of course, you can use this principle to make syrups of all kinds, from kiwi syrup for a sharp, biting addition to a passion fruit martini to salted caramel syrup, which is the ultimate addition to an espresso martini.
Make your own tonic water
If you get very into the world of syrups, one exciting option to try is making your own tonic syrup. With this on hand, you can add it to fizzy water to create your own tonic water, which has a much deeper and more interesting flavor than any tonic water you can buy. Though your tonic water will be darker in color and more opaque than you’re used to, it makes for an absolutely delicious gin and tonic when used in combination with some fresh lime juice.
You do not need to be careful when making this, however, as it includes using cinchona bark, which can be dangerous if ingested in large doses. You should only attempt to work with these kinds of ingredients if you’re confident in your ability to measure accurately and you have the correct equipment for doing so, as you will need an accurate scale. Some people also recommend using larger pieces of bark rather than powdered bark, as it is easier to filter out larger pieces.
If you’re confident that you can handle that, then making your own tonic syrup is really a fun experience as you can include varying quantities of ingredients like citrus peel, gentian root, caraway seeds, angelica root, allspice, and more to create something unique and delicious.
A favorite version of mine is an anise and grapefruit tonic syrup, made using 2 cups of water, the rind of a whole juiced grapefruit, 2 juiced lemons, 2 tablespoons of cinchona bark, 2 whole star anise, 2 pieces of dried licorice root, a few juniper berries, and a few small pieces of dried ginger, with sugar to taste. All these ingredients are heated together in a pan, then the solids are strained out using cheesecloth once the syrup has cooled. The syrup has a bracing bitterness with sharp grapefruit flavors and a subtle hint of anise, and it’s the perfect partner for citrus-heavy gins like Brooklyn Gin.
