Like any well established thing, you likely have some ideas and feelings around punch, the easy to serve and large batched cocktails served in pretty bowls. Past punches may not have delighted you and you may be reluctant to try a new, updated punch recipe. Or maybe, your signature punch was so central to your big life gatherings like baby showers of your sisters and Sunday lunches after church on Easter that you don't want to mess with a good thing. Either way, I implore you to re-visit punch with a new perspective because this punch recipe has the potential to make hosting easy, your buffet table beautiful, and is easily the most communal of drinking styles. To gather around a punch bowl is a pretty good thing.

I remember well the punch of my youth: ginger soda, sherbert, and a decorative ice ring, usually found in a church “multi purpose” room or maybe a bridal or baby shower I attended with my mom when she couldn’t get out of the house alone. I was a fan of this punch, as I was most things sugary and pink. My mom didn’t host a lot of parties and my stepmom did, but they never had punch. She is a “several bottles of red wine with an opener next to them on the table” kind of gal. So for most of my life, this is all punch was: a distant memory, adjacent to a gathering of all women, served in a plastic cup, vaguely grown up, very sweet.

As fond as these memories are, they are very rooted in that time. My tastes grew up, and punch didn’t grow up along with me, it got left behind. The 2000’s don’t see a lot of punch, in my area of the world. The closest to punch I’ve seen at any gathering in the last 20 years is a spiked lemonade in a beverage dispenser with a spigot. Punch bowls and ladles and fancy ice were just no longer in fashion. This made me sad. But a new era is here, and it makes me happy. The resurgence of punch, of grown up tasting, delightful looking, well-crafted punch, makes me very happy indeed.

Punch is such a festive way to batch a cocktail, and the self service makes cocktail hour wonderfully easy on a host. With a decorative ice block slowly melting into the punch bowl, not only is the drink kept cold, you don’t have to worry about refilling ice buckets. Better still, punch bowls are a thing of beauty and they are always available on thrift store shelves. Save yourself the real estate that you would be giving up to a bunch of bottles on your bar or buffet and make room for a pretty little number.

If you don’t have a punch bowl and don’t plan on it, a deep stockpot, the ceramic liner of a crock pot, or a big wooden salad bowl can work. Pro tip- test in advance that your ice ring will fit into the punch bowl of your choice! My very wide wooden salad bowl worked perfectly with the bundt cake pan until I bought a milk glass punch bowl with matching cups at the Goodwill a few years ago.

A good punch relies, like any other cocktail, on a balance of sweet, sour, bitter, and spirits. It should also be properly diluted with some water. This adds the water that would usually be added to a cocktail through the process of shaking or stirring them individually. If you follow the formula below, you can make your own punch with the Simple Goodness Sisters syrup, or your own homemade syrup, that you have on hand.

• Harvest Punch: Bourbon + oleo sachurum + Apple Pie syrup + angostura bitters + club soda + apple slices, whole cranberries and cinnamon sticks frozen into an ice mold
• Berry Mule Punch: Vodka + Spiced Lime Shrub + bitters + Berry Sage syrup + herbs and berries frozen into an ice mold
• Margamosa Punch: Tequila + fresh lime juice + SGS Blueberry Lavender syrup + prosecco + lime wheels and blueberries frozen into an ice mold
• The Genevieve Punch: Gin + lemon juice + SGS Rhubarb Vanilla syrup + citrus bitters + dry sparkling wine + edible flowers such as violas or calendula frozen into an ice mold
• Tiki Punch: Spiced Rum + oleo saccharum + Marionberry Mint syrup + cardamom bitters + ginger ale + an ice mold made with 1/2 cup of coconut cream for a white, opaque look and a little extra creaminess
• Garden Mocktail Punch: mint tea + lime juice + Lemon Herb syrup + NA citrus bitters + sparkling lemonade + ice mold made with herb leaves and flowers

• Sour- 2 cups of some combination of oleo saccharum, fine strained citrus juice, or a shrub (a vinegar based syrup)
• Sweet- 1/2 cup of syrup
• Bitter- 8 dashes of flavored bitters such as cardamom or orange bitters added directly to the bowl
• Mellow- 1 ½ cups of water to mingle flavors and mellow the taste
• Spirit- optional 4 cups of vodka, gin, tequila, or bourbon, or a NA spirit of your choice. You can also use a strongly brewed cold tea in place of spirits for great results.
• Bubbles- just before the party begins add 1cup of champagne or club soda for effervescence
• Ice- use recycled containers, bundt cake forms, spices, herbs, flowers and distilled water to make unique shapes and pretty, slow melting ice. To get clear ice you will need to use bottled, distilled water or boil water to remove cloudiness. I tend not to worry about a little cloudieness, as it melts, you will still see all the color and beauty of your decorations. Add fruit, spices, and herbs to the container of water and fill it only 2/3 full, freeze until mostly solid. Then fill to the top with more water, so that the decorations cannot float. If you skip this step and do a single freeze, that’s fine- your decorations will just end up in the punch more quickly if they’re not submerged in a layer of ice.
• Mix- Always stir + refrigerate punch without ice, and then add ice block, garnishes and bubbles just before party begins. Avoid stirring or the bubbles will dissolve.
• Serve- put appropriately sized cups next to the punch. A serving of this punch will be about 5 ounces, the average size of a teacup or martini glasses. This is why the decorative cups in punch bowl sets are always small. If you only have larger cups, pre-fill them with ice to help control serving size so your guests aren’t caught unaware and end up overserved.

• Carefully peel 6 lemons with a light hand and a Y peeler, avoiding the white part or “pith.” You will only be using the peels, so this is a great thing to make when you need lemon juice for another component of your meal, or you can freeze the lemon juice for future use.
• Combine this with 10 tablespoons or superfine white sugar in a bowl for several hours.
• Stir every so often to encourage the peels to breakdown and dissolve the sugar crystals.
• You will be left with a sour syrup after 5-6 hours.