Quinine Syrup
Jeffrey Morgenthaler
Photo by Alanna Hale
- Serves
- 28 ounces (830 milliliters), with enough tincture left over for 2 more batches
You can buy cinchona, whole gentian root, and soft-stick cinnamon in bulk from herbal medicine retailers and other specialty herb shops. And please use a scale for measurement; it makes a difference. I've kept the quantities in metric weights because it's important to be precise. Any electronic scale will have a setting for metrics as well as U.S. weights.
Ingredients
Quinine Tincture:
- 6 gram powdered cinchona bark (red will be more assertive, yellow is milder and less bitter)
- 150 milliliter vodka
Aromatics:
- 20 gram citric acid
- 10 gram whole gentian root
- 2 gram Ceylon soft-stick cinnamon, broken by hand into small pieces
- 30 gram lemon peel, peeled with a vegetable peeler
- 30 gram grapefruit peel, peeled with a vegetable peeler
- 400 gram sugar
- 500 milliliter water
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Directions
Instructions
- Step 1
To make the tincture: Dissolve the powdered cinchona bark in the vodka. Mix well, and then strain through a paper coffee filter fitted into a strainer (or a filter cone, if you have one) and suspend over a large enough container to accommodate the final volume of vodka. This process could take up to 1 hour, so don't worry if it seems like nothing is happening. (The tincture lasts forever.)
- Step 2
To make the aromatics: Combine all the ingredients for the aromatics in a medium saucepan. Heat over medium heat just until boiling, reduce the heat to low, and simmer, covered, for 20 minutes. Strain out the solids and let the liquid cool.
- Step 3
Stir 1 1/2 ounces (45 milliliters) of the quinine tincture into the cooled aromatics, and then bottle. Seal tightly and store in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks.