People often ask bartenders what their favorite drink is, and for me, that answer changes with the season, the weather, the occasion, and the time of day. If you made me pick an absolute favorite cocktail recipe, though, it would be the Old Fashioned.
Of course, the huckleberry and spruce tip flavor additions are anything but common. They're Northwest specific, and we love that.
When we conceive of new flavors, the idea of "terroir"is huge for us- simply put, it means that food should reflect in taste the area in which it is grown. This is big for wine, as in the reason that Champagne must legally ONLY be produced in Champagne, France. Anything else is a sparkling wine.
Terroir: the characteristic taste and flavor imparted to a wine by the environment in which it is produced.
-Google
On a less time honored but, we think no less tasty scale, our syrups are locally sourced not only because we love to support Washington agriculture, but because we love the taste of our homeland. This drink is ...wait for it...proof. Bad puns aside, I recently entered a contest. No, it was not a joke contest, thankfully, but I lost (or rather, did not win) anyway.
I have never entered a bartending competition before, and given the number of takes it took to get me to stop saying "butternut squash" instead of "butterscotch," I am not sure I will again. But man, was I inspired by my neighborhood to enter this one.
The prompt was to create a cocktail of no more than five ingredients and using widely available ingredients (this may have been where I was disqualified since I used our own syrup, but since we will ship the syrup anywhere, it felt like fair game to me...) that reflects the neighborhood in which you live or work. Here is my entry, which I feel must be shared again, because it's pretty great. I love the tiny little backroad town where our business is headquartered, Wilkeson, WA, and this drink and these words are like my little liquid love song to it:
My mobile bar business is based in the most inspiring, rough and tumble neighborhood I’ve ever had the privilege of working in. Wilkeson, WA, tastes likes the 236,000 acres of Mount Rainier national forest land it butts up against: complex, verdant, and untamed. This is a Cascade foothills town of 450 or so people, all deeply proud and deeply rooted. The old downtown, originally called “Hope”, and made up of privately owned homes and businesses, has survived, whereas the coal mining company owned “Uptown” fell alongside the industry’s demise. The people here endure, even as prosperity around them ebbs and flows like their Gale creek.
Once called the toughest town West of the Mississippi, the neighborhood has been built around this credo ever since. Built on coal and logging, and settled in 1877, the local bar carries on the legacy with the name the Pick ‘n Shovel, and many of the men still haul timber to afford the drinks there. Folks here know everyone by name and ancestry, and if they don’t know, they’ll ask. There are a mere eight buildings in town, and at least now, four of them are open. This is the most life this town has seen in ages.
People call it a resurgence, as more and more out of towners and listless, sedentary urban technologists drive out to explore the wilderness, and stop in for a bite and a taste. They drink beer and whiskey, to fit in among the regulars. The regulars prefer the strong stuff. They share classic tastes, old-fashioned values.
They know the surrounding hills like the backs of their own hands: weathered, but brightly alive. The old timers will take their huckleberry foraging spots with them to the grave as treasured secrets, such is their value. They’ll measure each season by the evergreens that tower among them- the dank smell of wet Spruce in fall, the smell of pine brought inside for winter celebrations, the tart, tasty signs of life that are the lime colored spruce tips in Spring. The spruce tips saved many early adventurers before the turn of the century, heading off scurvy with their vitamin C brightness, and they save these people each year. They are a needed sign of the warmth to come. After 200 days of gray, they unfurl from their sleepy paper coverings, the sky opens up to blue, and glasses lift in a toast- to the trees, to the heavens!
Yes, it is a little poetic and grandiose, but have you met me?
In any case, we're all winners if we're toasting with one of these.
makes 1 cocktail
Follow the "How to" video instructions here to make the cocktail!
And please, although I am rather stiff and awkward in it, do feel free to share the Youtube link to the video with friends on social media so that all the time Venise and I spent filming the 34 takes of this won't be in vain! (I think I was less stiff the first 16 times...)
After a humorously inefficient first shipping process (picture 8 months pregnant Venise carrying an armful of boxes into fedex twenty minutes before closing, and the lady behind the counter looking wary at best) the first shipped bottles are in the hands of customers across the USA and that feels really, really good. We are so proud to share a taste of the Pacific Northwest summer through these first edition Simple Goodness Sister Syrup flavors. We also sold a ton of bottles at the Garlic and Goats Festival at Venise's farm last weekend to our local community and couldn't stop smiling at people's reactions to their tastings. "Wow!" was a frequent response. The next most common response was "OK, what do you recommend I make with it?"
And that's where I (Belinda) come in. I've been using these syrups for 3 years in our craft cocktail catering business, Happy Camper Cocktails, and have some delicious ideas too share with you. Each syrup we've sent out into the world has come with a recipe card with a suggested drink. We also plan to continue adding more drink (and food!) ideas here, and even to share here recipes and ideas that you, our tasters and customers, submit by tagging us on social media or emailing us.
It is our very sincere goal to update the blog weekly with new recipes and ideas on how to use our Simple Goodness Syrups. While the most frequent drink choice for us at home is a simple soda (1 ounce of syrup + 12 ounces club soda) or Italian sodas (Venise's favorite, with half & half or whipping cream stirred in), there are a hundred ways or more to use the syrup and we want to help aid your creativity and quench your thirst!
Tons of drink recipes call for a sweet component. In fact, most of the classics besides a few (martini, negroni) have a sweetener in the recipe, and that's where you can plug in our syrups for fun, unique, craft cocktial bar style variations on all of the classics. The basics tenants of cocktail making are balance between flavors, temperature, dilution (this is where specialty ice and shaken vs. stirred have the greatest impacts) and presentation. In the flavor balance category, bartenders are keeping in mind a few characteristics.
Remember that Netflix show by Yasmin Nasarat? Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat are how Chefs balance foods. In cocktails, we work with sweet, sour, bitter, and spirit. Not every cocktail has all 4, but you need to have at least 3 of these in play to make a complete cocktail. The beauty of Simple Goodness Sisters syrups is that the syrups themselves contain 2 of these- sweet and sour. They are naturally preserved by acidity, so they have the sour factor built in. They're 50% sugar, so they obviously have the sweet component as well.
One of the biggest reasons why you often cannot get a decent non-alcoholic cocktails from a bartender at a standard bar is limited ingredients, and our syrups pack big flavor in one bottle. At your standard bar, most of the exotic flavors they're putting into their drinks come from the carefully infused spirits and liqueurs (some recipes are hundreds of years old and protected by their countries of origin as national treasures.) Often, the mixers behind the bar are limited to box juice, plain simple syrup, and some citrus.
These syrups solve all of those boring, overly sweet, "tastes like something my kid would order" mocktail problems. We fundamentally believe that good flavor should not be limited to imbibing, and that those who don't drink alcohol, for whatever reason, deserve a better drink experience.
Try using them with a little club soda, non-alcoholic wine or champagne, tonic water, or iced tea for an interesting, dynamic, and flavorful mocktail that will make you feel included. You're always invited to the Simple Goodness Sisters syrups party, whether you're adding booze or not!
And really, use the syrups wherever you would use any syrup- fresh lemonade, waffles, pancakes, desserts, oatmeal, Italian soda, coffee drinks, tea drinks, french toast, and more. We can't wait to see what you make next, and we'll keep posting recipes to encourage you along the way!
