Spice up your drinks with home-made Grenadine

Scofflaw Cocktail will put your Grenadine to good use.

Research on the Scofflaw Cocktail for a recent post encountered one major roadblock: the drink just didn’t quite taste right.  More research and a little more analysis soon found the root cause of the problem: store bought Grenadine.  Now the commercial Grenadine was not bad, but it just didn’t add anything to the cocktail.  In the Scofflaw, the Grenadine must offset the sour from the lemon juice, the dryness from the Vermouth, and even a little dryness from the Rye whiskey.  What was needed was something a little sweeter, but also with a little more pomegranate flavor.

At this point in the process, the research focus moved to finding a recipe for home-made Grenadine.  There are several recipes online that sound very tasty.  Some were very elaborate; Imbibe has a recipe that includes orange flower water and pomegranate molasses.  Cocktail guru Paul Clarke, in his Cocktail Chronicles blog, compares a hot and a cold process (the hot is where you cook the syrup).  Jacob Grier, a cocktail consultant from Portland, experiments with both of Clarke’s recipes and develops a hot recipe of his own in this very interesting post.

Starting from a position of laziness and being in a hurry, Clarke’s cold recipe (that he in turn had borrowed from yet another cocktail guru, David Wondrich) seemed like a good place to start.  It worked so well that I decided to stick with that one until it fails me, so here’s the recipe:

Grenadine

• 1 cup + 1 oz. Bakers’ Sugar
• 1 cup Pomegranate juice (POM works well)
• 1 oz. Vodka (as a preservative)

In a large jar, combine the cup of Pomegranate juice with the cup of Bakers’ Sugar and the Vodka.  Screw on the lid and shake well until the sugar is dissolved (it’s okay to take a break or two).  Add the final ounce of sugar and shake once more until it’s dissolved.  Keep refrigerated.