Campfire cocktails - shrub

hi i'm alan friedman you may know me as the guy who won't shut up about s bond or software build materials but i'm also here to talk about how cocktails can be delicious so today we're going to uh talk about three cocktails that we think are gonna be good fits for a nice summer kent model and we're gonna start with a non-alcoholic cocktail i can tell you that if you're someone who hosts or plans a gathering it is always a great play to have an option that uh doesn't have alcohol in it i still have friends in the hacker community today who remember the first time they showed up at my house uh and they you know for whatever reason

weren't drinking and just being able to hand them something that is more than just a soft drink has left a real lasting memory so it's something that i encourage uh everyone in our community should be taking some time off from drinking every so often and having good options can be great so today i'm going to teach you how to make a shrub really simple delicious you can use seasonal fruit and a shrub is just fruit sugar and vinegar and you can tune it to your taste so right now we're going to use some strawberries uh because they're in season and they make a great shrub what you're looking for really is any fruit that has a lot of moisture and not

a lot of sediment so something like a blueberry or a fig which has a lot of small bits in it won't be great because they'll end up in your syrup so what we're going to do is very simple we're going to start off just by slicing our strawberries you want to slice them nice and thin and you're going to go through your strawberries and the goal is really to maximize the exposure because we're trying to do what we're going to do is extract uh the juices and the flavor by using sugar so we're going to put them in here and then we're going to take our sugar and uh just gonna put a spoonful on top

and you'll see that you want maybe uh equivalent to weight um about a quarter the amount for the weight of your fruit but it's gonna vary and you'll see that it will stick to the fruit very quickly and it will turn into water within it'll draw out that liquid in a day or two and the more something's like a strawberry or a melon the easier it's going to be and the faster you're going to do it in fact uh we're going to put this under the magical cocktail table and we're going to pull out uh the one that we made just this morning so this is how much liquid you can see is there so what we're going to do

is just pull it out and as you can smell it just smells like the essence of the fruit there are some types of shrubs where you cook them down and that helps extract the juice and that's wonderful i love the flavor of having the fresh raw fruit and again this looks great with something like peaches watermelon any kind of melon anything that's got a lot of uh fruit uh juice in it so pears not uh more than apples and then we're going to just strain it out and something you can do here so the second we've got fruit we've got sugar we need our vinegar one of the things that you can use for your vinegar is to help extract some of

that last bit of flavor so we're going to dump it back in here you can really use any vinegar i think it's a lot of fun to use some specialty vinegars uh if you have some or you can find them at any gourmet shop uh you can really play around in it uh we're just gonna use very simple uh apple cider vinegar and we're not gonna use that much uh i like a mainly sweet one some people love them super tart so i'm going to use maybe two ounces of vinegar for you can see about three five ounces of sugar syrup and we're going to just pour it in and then have a quick stir around make

sure that that gets in and then we're going to drain that out uh so now we've got our mix here which is sugar syrup and some vinegar you can start to smell some of the vinegar in here and uh this is the base of a syrup and so the last piece as you serve it uh you're going to put some in a glass and then add some fizzy water and it's going to be that simple so we have our glass here uh we're just going to put in a couple tablespoons you're going to want it whatever your taste some people like a very light drink other people like a uh stronger thicker more tart drink depending on how you make it so

again we can go sweet tart strong light and so you're pouring it down you'll notice that of course because there's some sugars in particulate it's going to fizz that's going to be lovely if you make it for yourself i love that first sip when it's all foamy and delicious and if you're serving it for someone else or yourself treat yourself always nice to have a little bit of the fruit as a garnish so there you have it something that's fairly simple to make this will last in the fridge for months because it really is just sugar and acid both of those things are good for preservatives and then whenever someone comes over whenever you feel like taking

a night off uh pour a shrub with some fizzy water or use it as a base of a cocktail because there are lots of cocktails that start with this fruit thing really possibilities are endless so enjoy and happy camping