Spruce Tips, Part 2: Evergreen Cocktail Syrup

Spruce tips to be cooked with sugar

Besides being good in salads, spruce tip syrup is a grand addition to your cocktail bar. Steeped for a day to allow the puzzling flavors and smells of pine tree to infuse the sugar syrup. I like to use it in cocktails, but added to seltzer water is nice, or a sorbet. Many options. Spruce tip syrup can be used much like elderflower liqueur, it is very good with gin or vodka. Pairs well with lemon and lime.

And it is easy as pie to make. Increase the sugar and water content to the amount of spruce tips you have collected. It is a dead simple 1:1:1 ratio.

Spruce tip simple syrup

Spruce Tip Syrup

1 cup spruce tips
1 cup sugar
1 cup water

Put all the ingredients into an appropriately sized pot. Bring it to a simmer over medium heat. Simmer until the sugar has dissolved and the liquid around the tips is as clear as water. Turn off the heat.

Set the pot aside, covered, to steep for 8 hours. A little more or a little less wont kill it, I find 8 hours is a suitable amount of time for the flavors to be extracted.

Bottled Spruce Tip Cocktail Syrup

Strain the syrup with a fine mesh strainer. Place a funnel in the bottle to be filled, the strainer held over that, and carefully pour the syrup through it. Use the back of a spoon to press extra syrup from the collected evergreen tips.

Your golden syrup will last months and months unless it is drank first.