Every warm spice in one bottle, so a mulled drink takes thirty seconds instead of half an hour. It is the sweetener in the Brûléed Orange Old Fashioned and it turns any bourbon drink autumnal on demand.
Made with demerara sugar rather than white, because the light molasses note belongs with the spices and with barrel-aged whiskey, and toasted whole spices, because thirty seconds in a dry pan before they hit the water roughly doubles what they give you.
⭐ Toast the spices. It is the difference between this and a bottle of the shop-bought stuff. Heat drives the volatile oils to the surface of the seed and bark; untoasted spice steeped in syrup tastes faintly of everything and clearly of nothing.
Ingredients
- 2 cups demerara or turbinado sugar
- 1 cup water
- 3 cinnamon sticks, broken up
- 1 tbsp whole allspice berries
- 1 tsp whole cloves
- 2 star anise
- 1 tsp black peppercorns
- 1 inch fresh ginger, sliced
- 2 wide strips orange peel, no pith
- 1 vanilla pod, split (optional)
Directions
- Toast the whole spices — cinnamon, allspice, cloves, star anise, peppercorns — in a dry pan over medium heat for 30–60 seconds, until they smell strongly. Watch them; they go from fragrant to scorched fast.
- Tip them into a saucepan with the water, sugar, ginger and orange peel.
- Heat, stirring, until the sugar has completely dissolved and the syrup runs clear rather than merely thin.
- Reduce to the barest simmer for 15–20 minutes. Do not boil hard — you are steeping, not reducing, and boiling changes the ratio you measured.
- Off the heat, add the vanilla if using, cover, and let it steep as it cools — an hour, or overnight in the fridge for a much stronger syrup.
- Strain through a fine sieve, bottle, and label it with the date.
Notes
Keeps 4–6 weeks refrigerated — the 2:1 sugar ratio does most of that work, because there is not enough free water left for spoilage organisms. Half an ounce of vodka per cup extends it further at no cost in flavour.
Use about 1/4 oz in a 2 oz Old Fashioned. It is concentrated and it is bringing flavour as well as sugar, so treat it as a rich syrup, not as 1:1 simple.
Adjust to taste, and go easy on two of them: cloves and star anise both dominate quickly. Cinnamon, allspice and orange are the backbone; everything else is seasoning.
Beyond drinks: excellent on pancakes and waffles, brushed on a ham, or stirred into whipped cream. It also makes a first-rate non-alcoholic drink with sparkling water and lemon.
Compare with Cinnamon Simple Syrup, which is the single-note version of the same idea and better when you want cinnamon specifically rather than “autumn”.