Growing Your Own Cocktails, Mocktails, Teas & Infusions. Jodi Helmer
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Strawberry (Fragaria × ananassa)
ROOTS
Valerian (Valeriana officinalis)
INTRODUCTION
Exploring a garden center will give you many ideas for adding to your garden—some standard, some surprising.
Each season, I vow to go to the garden center with a plan: a list, some idea of what I want to grow, a realistic notion of how much space we have, how much we can eat in a season, and how we might use the ingredients in our kitchen. And, each season, the same thing happens: I abandon all logic the moment I see colorful seed packets and seedlings poking through the soil in small plastic pots. Who cares that I have never tried a cucamelon or grown lemongrass? The unusual finds end up in the cart alongside tried-and-true favorites, and it all ends up in the garden. When the plants mature, I scramble to find creative ways to use the bounty. For me, the most successful reimagining has been taking those ingredients from garden to glass.
Sitting in your garden, surrounded by fresh ingredients you grew, is the best way to enjoy a garden-to-glass beverage.
As my garden grew beyond my original plans, the fruits, vegetables, and herbs growing outside my back door started finding their way not just onto our plates but also into our favorite—and most memorable—drinks. As it turns out, this wasn’t just happening at our house. Garden to glass is a trend that is quickly catching on as gardeners (and mixologists) have looked beyond their plates and started incorporating their harvests into cocktails, mocktails, teas, infused waters, lemonades, juices, and other fresh, flavorful drinks. A beverage garden combines two of the things I love most: great drinks and a garden filled with the ingredients to make them.
A mushroom cocktail is just one example of the flavor innovation that has been occurring in recent years.
The garden-to-glass trend started with cocktails. The National Restaurant Association has featured artisan spirits, including culinary cocktails made from fresh savory- or herb-infused ingredients, on its annual list of the hottest culinary trends for an entire decade. In 2019, Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants released its Culinary + Cocktail Trends Forecast, and in it bartenders listed “vegetable cocktails” as a strong (and growing) trend, citing plans to go beyond conventional cocktail ingredients like celery, cilantro, mint, and cucumber and incorporate more surprising vegetables such as endives, fiddleheads, tomatillos, mushrooms, and sunchokes into their drink menus. Mike Ryan, director of bars at Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, explained, “A lot of these influences come directly from the kitchen. There might be a flavor profile a bartender loves in a particular dish, and he or she figures out how to bring that to life in a cocktail.”
Pairing the flavor profiles of a cocktail with a dish is a great challenge for modern chefs— and amateurs!
Even with limited space, you can use just your windowsill to start your own beverage garden.
The trend quickly expanded beyond cocktails. Mocktails, cocktail-like drinks made without alcohol, are an ever-expanding menu category, and more mixologists and home bartenders are skipping supermarket fruit juices and syrups for homemade versions, making ingredients with fresh harvests from their gardens. Even soda is being reformulated. A USA Today article on the trend notes that sales of carbonated soft drinks are flat, but craft sodas are capturing a “share by hyping premium and natural ingredients, creative flavors, limited runs, unusual packaging, or their local roots.” Craft sodas, like other small-batch beverages, tend to use healthier ingredients and natural sweeteners such as agave nectar, stevia, and honey, which all start in the garden.
And, while it might seem daunting or fancy, growing the ingredients to make tea, infused water, cocktails, mocktails, lemonades, and other culinary beverages is actually a great project for both beginning and experienced gardeners. Fruits, vegetables, and herbs are often easy to grow (most will thrive in pots on a sun-drenched windowsill), and making a garden-to-glass drink can be super simple.
Your own beverage garden can be as basic as a raised bed with a handful of herbs or as elaborate as an entire landscape filled with fruits, vines, trees, and flowers that can be mixed, muddled, blended, shaken, and stirred into fabulous craft beverages.
When the time comes to harvest your bounty, you can stick with the basics—a few handfuls of vegetables in the blender for fresh vegetable juice; muddled strawberries and sugar for lemonade; or mint leaves steeped in boiling water for tea that tastes better than anything you can buy in a store. Or you can take your mixology skills to the next level, turning up the flavor on basic cocktails like mojitos and sangria by using just-picked ingredients from your custom beverage garden. You can even make your own simple syrups and shrubs—the building blocks of popular craft beverages— with your garden bounty. (Never heard of shrub? See page 126!)
Go as deep into mixology as you wish—even the advanced stuff only requires a small set of tools.
Whether you’ve never tended to a plant or already have a large garden and want a new hobby, starting a beverage garden and sipping refreshing and delicious concoctions is a great way to add a punch of flavor to your favorite drinks or experiment with new favorites. You’ll soon find yourself planning an entire garden around ingredients you can eat and drink.
Read the plant descriptions and see what appeals to you (and your growing conditions); check out the sample garden designs for inspiration; and experiment with the recipes to discover new favorite drinks. Whether you grow a handful of plants for one go-to beverage or decide to fill your garden with edibles to make all of your drinks from scratch,