easy drinking shrub – Twice as Tasty

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 to make Raspberry Shrub Mocktail or Cocktail

If you’d walked into my kitchen late last night, you would have found me turning some of summer’s first fruit into a batch of shrub. A drinking shrub, as I share this week in my Twice as Tasty column for the Flathead Beacon, is an old DIY beverage that fans of today’s sparking water and hard seltzers should have on their radar. The combination of fruit, vinegar, and sugar into a concentrate that is then diluted with fizzy water to taste packs a flavor punch and quenches thirst of hot summer days. Mix in a couple of shots of alcohol and you end up with a sparkling evening cocktail.

I usually have several shrub flavors in my fridge, made with the current bumper crop of fresh fruit or whatever I squirreled away in the freezer for the off-season. Although I find strawberries too sweet to pair with rhubarb in desserts and jams, the vinegar in a shrub balances this popular combination for my taste buds.
Learn to make Strawberry-Rhubarb Shrub