Simple Syrup

Why This Recipe Works

Sugar in some form is a fundamental building block of cocktails; the earliest cocktail recipes called for four essential ingredients: spirits, bitters, water, and sugar. Sometimes sugar is used to provide an unequivocal punch of sweetness; other times, it is a single note in a chord of flavors, used to balance acidic, bitter, savory, or other qualities of a cocktail. Modern cocktail recipes sometimes call for granulated sugar or sugar cubes, but these can be difficult to dissolve, leaving you with grit in your drink. Alternatively, some recipes call for sugar in the form of a syrup, usually either simple syrup (with a 1:1 ratio of sugar to water) or rich syrup (with a 2:1 ratio of sugar to water), which is easy to incorporate into all types of cocktails. We wanted to keep things simple (literally), so we came up with a quick method using warm water (no cooking required) to produce a basic simple syrup that we could use in all our cocktails.