With the rhubarb plants doing well and young fresh stalks ready to pick, I was intrigued yesterday by an on-line recipe for a rhubarb cocktail. Making a rhubarb syrup and mixing it with gin was definitely worth a shot.

I didn’t want to raid the patch too much so opted to use just a couple of stalks, which turned out to be about a quarter of the amounts in the recipe.

Rounding everything down by 75% took away some of the guilt about adding lots of sugar to the fruit before boiling it in water and freshly squeezed lemon juice.

Rhubarb really doesn’t take long to break down and turn to pulp, but with the sugar in the mix it took quite a while to cool down.

Once it had, it was into a muslin sheet and hung up from a handle to drip the juice into a jug.

After an hour, a final squeeze got out as much as possible. It wasn’t a lot but would be enough to try the gin cocktail later, so it went into the fridge in a Kilner bottle.

Come the evening, I put a measure of the syrup in a glass, followed by the same amount of good quality gin, and topped it up with tonic water, ice and some slices of lime.

Good? Yes, definitely. It had a nice jammy taste but I nearly missed it as the syrup does settle at the bottom at first. Mixing it up with a swizzle stick is essential. I must make more next time 🙂