Iced tea and fresh-squeezed juice are nice, but I like a little tang in my cooling, refreshing summer beverages—probably no surprise given that I’m the author of a pickling cookbook. When you open my fridge this time of year, you’re more likely to find several bottles of drinking shrubs and kombucha than jugs of iced tea. As I explain this week in my Twice as Tasty column for the Flathead Beacon, I enjoy drinking shrubs as nonalcoholic daytime drinks and use them as cocktail mixers.

Think of drinking shrubs as homemade replacements for today’s highly popular flavored sparkling waters and hard seltzers. Shrubs combine fruit, sugar, and vinegar into a concentrate that you dilute to taste with soda water. This lets you make homemade sparkling water as strongly flavored, tangy, or sweet as you like. But the concentrate has many more uses. Pour a splash into iced tea or lemonade for bonus flavor, or mix it with alcohol for a craft cocktail.

Learn more about making and enjoying shrubs and get the complete recipe for Raspberry Shrub Mocktail or Cocktail in my column.

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Almost any fruit and even some vegetables make delicious shrubs, which is why my fridge usually holds multiple varieties. The recipe in this week’s column is written for raspberries, but treat it as a master recipe for other berries and fruits, fruit combinations like strawberry and rhubarb, and even vegetables like cucumbers. I find that adding herbs or spices gives shrubs another layer of complexity that mellows the tart vinegar, and I vary those just as widely. You can find more ideas for pairing fruit and herbs in the recipe index.

The amount of shrub concentrate you mix into soda water, iced tea, or lemonade is simply a matter of taste. In cocktails, I experiment widely with the type and volume of alcohol, but a 1:2 ratio of shrub concentrate to liquor works in most cases. These are some of my favorite combinations.

• Red raspberry-mint shrub with gin
• Golden raspberry-cilantro shrub with tequila, mezcal, or agave spirit and a salted rim
• Strawberry-Rhubarb Shrub with basil and white rum
• Strawberry–Balsamic Shrub, in my book The Complete Guide to Pickling, with gin or tequila
• Roasted Raspberry–Thyme Shrub, also in my pickling cookbook, with gold rum and homemade orange liqueur (triple sec)
• Pear-ginger shrub (which I often “make” by saving the brine from pickled Fresh Pears with Lemon in my pickling cookbook) with rye whiskey or gin
• Rhubarb-rosemary shrub with white rum
• Gooseberry-lavender shrub with vodka
• Tart cherry-mint shrub with rye whiskey or bourbon
• Cucumber-smoked salt shrub in a gin martini or splashed into a Mega-Mint Mojito
• Watermelon–Basil Shrub with white rum or vodka

Want more Twice as Tasty recipes? Get my books! Click here to order a personally signed, packaged, and shipped copy of The Complete Guide to Pickling directly from me. I also share tasty ways to use pickles in The Pickled Picnic; it’s only available here.