Instant Mint Julep

This is what the syrup looks like neat

I found myself with a glut of fresh mint after one of the Candlelight Club events. I don’t like to see food go to waste, so I’ll usually round up all the left-over ingredients and cart them home. (After Halloween, in addition to the flesh cut from the giant jack-o-lanterns, I also brought home half a dozen squashes of various kinds, which had been bought for decoration—and I’m pleased to say we made our way through all of them.)

Obviously fresh herbs won’t keep for that long, and there is only so much tabbouleh a man can eat, so I hit upon the idea of making a mint-flavoured syrup.

The Mint Julep is a classic—nay, the classic—drink of the American South, but I’ve always struggled to make satisfactory examples at home. The general idea is that you mash fresh mint at the bottom of a glass with sugar or sugar syrup before adding whiskey and lots of ice; but I always find the mint flavour elusive and the mangled shrubbery in the glass a bit unsightly.

So for this experiment I infused the mint into the syrup ahead of time, kept it in the fridge and just added it to bourbon on the rocks to make the drink. And it worked extremely well.

I did this a few months ago, so I’m a bit hazy on the proportions but I think I measured about 400 ml of granulated sugar and 200 ml or water and heated them in a pan till all the sugar was dissolved. I added two rough handfuls of mint and left it on a low simmer. I can’t quite remember exactly how long I left it—certainly no more than 30 minutes, and to be honest by the end I was sure I wouldn’t want to leave it any longer, as the mint was just starting to take on a cooked flavour. I strained and bottled it. And the result was a julep with a clearer mint flavour and no bits of greenery floating around.

To be honest, I have heard that at the Kentucky Derby—of which the Mint Julep is the official drink—they use a mint syrup, perhaps just for speed and efficiency, though I don’t know if any fresh mint is involved with that or just a commercial essence.

One caveat is that although it keeps quite well without the flavour changing, it won’t last forever. After a few months the flavour is somehow not as fresh and, like all syrups, it is at risk of mould.* And to be honest I don’t drink juleps that often, so it does tend to hang around here. But if you do have a julep habit, then you should consider making a batch of this stuff at the beginning of the summer.

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UPDATE 23rd June 2022: I later made a second batch and this time I muddled the fresh mint continuously for five minutes in the simmering syrup, then strained it immediately. I think this is a better bet, as the flavour was no less strong, but you avoid any hint of a “cooked” mint taste.

A julep made with the mint syrup (in the jug to the right). It should really be crushed ice.

* The hardiest syrup I make is grenadine. This is traditionally made from pomegranate juice, but I was surprised to see that commercial grenadine today is mostly made from red berries. Since you can buy 100% fresh pomegranate juice in the supermarket (ever since the pomegranate was declared a super-food), it was easy enough to experiment with. For simple syrup I normally blend two-thirds sugar with one-third water, but I found that using the same ratio with pomegranate juice actually produced something that set solid at room temperature—perhaps there is pectin or something in the juice. However, at 1:1 it words a treat. The resulting syrup has a certain tannic tartness that balances the sweetness and makes it a very useful cocktail ingredient if you don’t have a massively sweet tooth. And, kept in the fridge, it seems to last an extremely long time.

Drinking off the land

The final version

Of course foraging is a bit of a Thing these days (doubtless part of the whole trend for “artisan” everything, slow living, etc). But I still find it rather uplifting to be able to cook with and eat something I have just found growing wild. It doesn’t come up much here in London, but often on holiday in more rural bits of Britain I’ll be able to gather wild garlic or marsh samphire (and, on one occasion, rock samphire—though I wouldn’t recommend that). This time round, while stomping around Cornwall’s Penwith peninsula (the most westerly part of mainland Britain) we were surrounded by blackberry bushes—every country path was bordered by them and they are equally happy popping up at the edge of a car park or road. These wild ones were not generally as sweet as the huge commercial ones you can buy in supermarkets, but it did seem a waste not to do something with them.

The Mk I with berries but no mint

So I made myself a sort of Bramble cocktail. This Dick Bradsell creation is normally made with gin, lemon juice, sugar syrup and crème de mure, but I used fresh blackberry juice instead of the liqueur. It worked pretty well, though I think you have to get the balance between gin and fruit right, to keep the juniper in its place. (I was using Tanqueray.)

But we also found fresh water mint growing by a stream near to where we were staying: it was rather tasty, with a zippy, almost mentholic mint flavour. So my next experiment was a sort of Southside Fizz—gin, lime juice and sugar syrup as before, but this time with about a heaped teaspoon of mint, chopped then muddled with the lime and syrup, before adding the gin, ice and—in the absence of soda water—a little tonic. (Without the mixer it is just a Southside.) This was actually more successful, with the mint flavour clear and refreshing.

But the best was yet to come. For my final experiment I combined both of these ideas into one cocktail—to great effect, I felt, as the blackberries and the mint have a natural harmony. (I also felt the that the blackberries sat more comfortably with the gin, which may just mean I got the proportions right: sadly I had no measuring equipment with me, so the proportions here are an estimate.)

The Mk II, Southside Fizz

Forager Cocktail
45ml gin
Juice of half a lime
About 1–1½ tsp sugar syrup
1 heaped tsp chopped water mint (although I’m sure it would work with other kinds of mint)
About 30 wild blackberries (fewer if using larger commercial berries)

Add the mint to a glass with the syrup and lime juice and muddle to extract the flavour. Add the berries and muddle until reduced to a pulp. Strain (rubbing through the strainer if necessary, to release all the juice) into another glass, filled with ice, or into a shaker and shake with ice then pour into a cocktail glass. Garnish with mint, a lime wedge, or a blackberry. I was constructing this in the kitchen of a rented cottage, so I had no shaker or special equipment, but I imagine you could use a food processor to purée the berries, but they will still need straining, as they contain a lot of seeds.