When reading off a spec sheet for an Old Fashioned or a Daiquiri, you'll likely see a small measure of sugar syrup in the drink. This syrup might specify the type of sugar in more or less specific terms like brown sugar, white sugar, cane sugar, demerara sugar, muscovado sugar, turbinado sugar or some less common type of sugar you've never even heard of. Fancy a bit of panella or kokuto sugar, perhaps?
If you think that's a confusing amount of sugars, then we as an industry like to add to the confusion by also having many ways to label the sugar such as simple syrup, rich syrup, rock candy syrup, gum syrup, gomme, rich sugar syrup, rich simple syrup or even just "sugar" without specifying it's been syrupped in advance, nor specifying which of the above sugars have been used.
It goes without saying that this is not exactly an elegant way to be taught about syrups and we haven't even begun discussing all the equipment many claim are needed...
The Entire Recipe for a Simple Syrup
The term "simple syrup" is widely agreed upon as being an equal ratio (1:1) combination of sugar and water. The sugar is often fine caster sugar as it's easier to work with.
To make Simple Syrup, combine 100g water with 100g of sugar and mix until it's dissolved.
Simple Syrup (1:1)
Prep ingredients
- 1000 g Caster Sugar
- 1000 g Water
Yield
1625 ml
Instructions
Combine sugar with water and mix until fully dissolved
That's it. No blenders, no heating on a pan, no complexity. Just sugar, water and a bit of patience.
If all you were looking for is a recipe, that's your reading done for today.
Below, I'll briefly discuss variations, the equipment claims and also give a short opinionated rant on unnecessary complexity in training materials.
The Entire "Creative" Recipe for a Simple Syrup
To get a bit more creative, try swapping out caster sugar and replacing it with one of the many named sugar types above. Those sugars will come with different flavours, but the method remains the same despite most sugars not being as fine as caster sugar. The only real difference is it takes longer to dissolve in liquid.
To make fruit syrups, it's simply a case of swapping out the water for a fruit juice. How you decide to juice and strain your fruit is up to you and of course the sweetness will be less controlled due to the fruits varying nature, but again the method is the exact same.
Demerara Simple Syrup
Prep ingredients
- 1000 g Demerara Sugar
- 1000 g Water
Yield
1625 ml
Instructions
Combine sugar with water and mix until fully dissolved
Raspberry Simple Syrup
Prep ingredients
- 1000 g Raspberry Juice
- 1000 g Caster Sugar
Yield
1625 ml
Instructions
Once raspberries have been juiced and strained, combine with equal weight of sugar and mix until fully dissolved
So Why the Complexity
The above sections are literally everything you need to know for 90% of your needs when it comes to making sugar syrups at home and even in most bars, so why is it so damn difficult to read a recipe for someone else's syrup?
Beyond the different ratios of sugar, which we'll cover a little further down, I think two forces play into this, so let's take a short step away from the bars and into the world of science and consulting.
The Paradox of Expert Advice
Let's say you hired me as a consultant for your bar program and we agreed I was to deliver 5 cocktail recipes using 5 different syrups. You have paid me a silly amount of dollar for this task because you know (or maybe falsely believe...) that I am mad intelligent when it comes to bar prep. I go off and do the work, then come back to you with a spec sheet containing your new and innovative recipes.
Imagine for a second you have paid me thousands of dollars for consulting as a third party expert and what you get back in writing is a single A4 sheet of recipes... You'd probably be pretty upset and demand an explanation.
It doesn't matter how truly useful that sheet might be and it doesn't matter that your whole team can easily and clearly understand it to replicate 5 basic classics using 5 basic (and very delicious!) syrups to make your guests consistently happy on every shift. (Which, if we are honest with ourselves, is the only metric that matters in a real bar!)
The perception is that you have paid a lot of money to get a lot of insight, and no amount of insight can be made in such a short amount of space.
Counter intuitively here is that if I came back with a 100 page tombstone explaining the chemistry of heat transfer, hydration rates, density and solubility curves with references to gum syrups from Jerry Thomas in 1862, you and your team would have a really hard time reading it, you'd find very little direct use for it, yet it looks like you got your money's worth because that's surely some advanced information, so you're happy!
In effect, I would get rewarded for writing badly and making zero effort in explaining things in a way that's helpful for learning and useful behind a real bar.
The paradox is that we value perceived complexity over simplicity. When we catch ourselves thinking "Is that it?", that should be a sign of great understanding and success! It should not be a trigger for diving into some jargon filled landscape of micro-perfecting an exact 69.71% sugar syrup because you just discovered a refractometer for calculating Brix.
Something being long and hard to read does not make it better, more expertly crafted or of higher quality. It just makes it long and hard to read...
Everything is Relative
The second example of complexity involves our good friend Albert Einstein. We've all seen his famous E=mc² formula which, if you are a science nerd, is apparently super easy to understand in hindsight. (I am not one of those nerds so I only mention the formula to sound mad intelligent, in an attempt to charge thousands of dollars for consulting on simple syrup recipes)
Einstein's complete explanation and "proof" for this formula was written in just 3 pages.
In contrast to Einstein's elegance, the original proof for why 1+1=2 was more than 300 pages long!
Why this staggering difference?
When proving 1+1=2, in Principia Mathematica, the authors decided to begin by defining numbers and fundamental logic starting from absolutely nothing. The hundreds of pages before the concluding proof are spent explaining in detail how we get something from nothing. That in itself sounds super confusing.
It would be the equivalent of the tombstone mentioned above where before you can learn that sugar+water=syrup, you'd have to first read through descriptions of Brix, formulas for % w/w concentration and chemical structures of water molecules.
This approach is fine for the super nerds who explicitly look for deeper understanding, but for teaching the basics, it's a terrible approach. When the authors of Principia Mathematica had finally finished down the very long road to proving why 1+1=2, they ended with this delightful footnote:
"The above proposition is occasionally useful."
A footnote that also suits many modern recipe descriptions...
In contrast, let's look at Einstein's method of explanation. Instead of explaining the fundamental principles of physics, Einstein elegantly references someone else's previous work and then builds a little bit on top of it.
He uses existing knowledge as a stepping stone to keep things simple instead of adding explanation for unrelated ideas or concepts we simply don't need to know.
For our context of making syrups simple, we can learn from Einstein by saving the complex chemistry for reference documents and focusing instead on the specific recipe at hand. If you are only just starting to make syrups, then it's deeply unhelpful to be shown tables of solubility rates and temperatures along with dense descriptions of blender equipment or food processors.
All you need to know is that a syrup is simply defined as a sugar dissolved in a liquid and that sugar is quite happy to just dissolve without much effort, up to a certain point. Therefore making a simple syrup is just combining sugar and liquid and mixing till it dissolves.
Nothing more and nothing less.
Simple Syrup, Rich Syrup & Gum Syrup
If you're an experienced bartender who's been part of the recent cocktail revolution you might be absolutely fuming with me for starting off with explaining a 1:1 syrup when a 2:1 ratio is "clearly superior for texture" and also the go-to ratio for many American bars and famous recipes today.
The superiority argument is subjective on flavour, but the fact that it's widely used today is valid. A 2:1 rich syrup is also more stable so your prep lasts longer, but I would argue 1:1 is easier to work with as it pours cleaner.
Regardless of which is "better" I say we get some terminology down for agreement so we can continue to look at some original prep from the 1800s, just for fun!
A "simple syrup" is shorthand for a 1:1 ratio of sugar to water and a "rich syrup" is shorthand for 2:1 ratio of sugar to water.
| Ratio | Sugar | Water | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simple Syrup | 1:1 | 1000g | 1000g |
| Rich Syrup | 2:1 | 2000g | 1000g |
Simple Syrup (1:1)
Prep ingredients
- 1000 g Caster Sugar
- 1000 g Water
Yield
1625 ml
Instructions
Combine sugar with water and mix until fully dissolved
Rich Syrup (2:1)
Prep ingredients
- 2000 g Caster Sugar
- 1000 g Water
Yield
2260 ml
Instructions
Combine sugar with water and mix until fully dissolved
If you use a 1.5:1 ratio that's fine, but it's technically neither "simple" or "rich". Just call it a sugar syrup. And regardless of the ratio you prefer, if you label your syrup "Rich Simple", you should be exiled from bar management and training until you've had a word with yourself.
What about Gum Syrup?
Gum syrup, sometimes just called gomme, is commonly used interchangeably for sugar syrups today but actually has a bit of history.
Gum arabic is a dried tree sap or resin used widely as a thickener and emulsifier in foods. It's a soluble dietary fiber so despite it's use as an additive in food, it's actually not bad for you at all.
Old cocktail books, like Jerry Thomas' "How to Mix Drinks" from 1862, reference gum syrup in the Old Fashioned style drinks. It's simply a sugar syrup that's had gum added to the mix for extra texture.
In the appended section of Thomas' book there is a recipe for gum syrup which is very close to a clean 3:2:1 ratio of sugar, water and gum. So as an example that would be 150g sugar, 100g water and 50g gum. Conveniently a 2:1 ratio of solids to water.
Most bars today just use basic sugar syrups as gum is slightly harder to work with but if you're curious about playing with it, feel free to give the classic ratios above a go.
If you do want to try making it, I'd recommend first "hydrating" the gum in water in the fridge for 24 hours. It will easily dissolve by itself but it's VERY slow to do so and trying to force it is just gonna be annoying. Once you have your hydrated gum water, add the sugar to the solution and mix till fully dissolved.
A Note on Equipment - The Many Myths of Syrups
As mentioned already, to make simple syrup, rich syrup, or any other sugar syrup it's a simple task of combining liquid and sugar.
You'll likely find many syrups that say to use boiling water, heat the syrup in a pan to dissolve faster or use a blender to combine. All are valid suggestions, but most of the time not necessary at all.
A blender will aerate the syrup so it goes cloudy until it's been allowed to settle in the fridge for a while. And if it needs to settle in the fridge for a while anyway, then you might as well skip the blender and let the sugar dissolve by itself.
Heat is a fair shout to speed up dissolving the sugar. Sugar will dissolve faster in hot water than cold water, but I would stick to just pre-heating the water and combining to ensure it's weighed correctly and any evaporation is trapped in your container. If heating on the pan you'll lose water through evaporation which throws off the ratio. That's fine at home but terrible from a professional consistency perspective.
Quite a few myths are attached to applying heat when making syrups with the big ones being that it "cooks" the sugars which changes flavour or that it inverts the sugar. Neither is true when talking of classic sugar syrups without fruit.
A heated simple syrup doesn't taste different from a cold dissolved syrup unless you've actively caramelised the sugar before adding water. Sugar also won't just invert by accident. You'll either need an acidic element to start the process or the temperature needs to go above boiling for a prolonged time which is slow and tedious.
If you are making fruit syrups, then this is slightly different as many fruits contain natural acids and cooked fruit juice taste different from cold pressed juice. Technically speaking, this is a fruit juice question and not a "how to get from fruit juice to syrup" kind of question though.
If we are talking about heating, evaporation and invertion of sugar, we are diving into more advanced stuff and the whole point of this article is to defend simplicity. I'll dive into the more complex side of syrup science in a separate article and end this one with a reminder;
To make a simple syrup, combine an equal ratio of sugar (say 1000g) and water or juice (also 1000g) in a container and mix to dissolve. You don't need any specialist equipment beyond a scale for weighing and a closed container for mixing. Cheers!
"The above proposition is always useful."