image CHAPTER 10

image image INGREDIENTS image

Housemade syrups, tinctures, infusions, and even bitters are essential to Brooklyn bars. These ingredients can sound complicated—lapsang souchong syrup? Lime-ginger cordial? But from a culinary perspective, making them tends to be dead simple. If you can heat up sugar and water, you can make any of the syrups below; if you have a bottle and a funnel and don’t mind waiting 24 hours, you can make any of the infused spirits. Of course, it takes a good deal of time and patience for bartenders to develop these recipes, such that they perform just right in a cocktail—but the work to make them? That’s easy.

Some of these (cinnamon syrup, vanilla syrup) require just minutes of work, and ingredients you may already have in your pantry; others are a bit more involved, and a few, for the true cocktail geeks only. (Fermenting your own beet shrub: Awesome when you get it right, but a pretty intense process.)

Having to create a ginger syrup before you even start shaking a cocktail may seem just too complicated, and of course if you’re looking for a quick drink, it’s not that practical. But once you’ve made the ginger syrup, it’ll keep for weeks—and not only can you make that favorite cocktail night after night, but you can play around with it in other cocktails, too. And infused spirits? They’ll last virtually forever. (Or make an unbeatable holiday or party gift.)

So devote five minutes to making a simple thyme-infused gin, or chamomile honey, and see where it takes you. Once you’ve got your housemade ingredients sitting around, you’ll be itching to use them—and how impressed will your friends be that you infused your own gin?