Store-bought extracts for at-home drinks

I have recently been watching videos from Darcy O’Neil’s YouTube channel Art of Drink. In it, he goes through techniques for how to extract flavor compounds and use them to make wonderful beverages (mostly sodas). One of the key tools he employs is extracts. As someone who loves craft cocktails but is trying to cut back on my alcohol consumption, extracts seemed like a great way to get the flavors I loved in cocktails in non-alcoholic options.

To grossly oversimplify the process: you make an extract by soaking 10 grams of the herb/spice/substance whose flavor you wish to extract in 100 ml of alcohol (or some other solvent) for a period of time (weeks for maceration, a day for percolation). You then combine one ounce of that extract with around 31 ounces of simple syrup, depending on how strong you want the flavor to be (Darcy recommends 4:3 simple syrup). I have begun experimenting with making my own extracts and tinctures via this percolation method, and it has been amazing. But I’ll go into that in another post. Here, I want to talk about a more convenient, lower barrier-to-entry option.

I had this idea when I was perusing the spice section of my local supermarket. I noticed they had a surprisingly wide selection of extracts. They had the usual suspects of vanilla and almond, but also maple, lemon, and orange. As I continued to look I saw even more options: mint, peppermint, coconut, cinnamon, anise, rum, cherry, strawberry, chocolate, and banana. These store-bought extracts are the shortcut to making flavored drinks. They are not as cost-effective in the long-run as making your own extracts, and you also don’t have control over the precise concentrations of flavor compounds, but it is very convenient and makes it very easy to start making flavored non-alcoholic drinks.

For example, with vanilla, almond, lemon, and banana extracts, you can make a decent approximation to a cream soda. With mint and lemon extracts, you can turn a lemonade in a wonderful mint lemonade with added lemon flavor (without the added sourness). Or use strawberry instead of mint to get a strawberry lemonade without needing strawberries on hand. I’ve also experimented with adding chocolate or pandan extract to nutty Hojicha tea, and it works very well. Pandan extract, and many others can be easily found online such as at Amazon.

And these work just as well in alcoholic drinks. The best use in that case is to make flavored syrups on demand from a base simple syrup. You need only add an ounce of extract to about 16 ounces (will vary depending on how strong you like it), or you can dose it out on a per drink basis by simply adding a few drops to the cocktail shaker. This way you can have a wider variety of flavored syrups at your fingertips without needing to make a bunch of different flavored syrups that often have a much shorter shelf life compared to simple syrup.

And yes, these extracts do technically contain alcohol, but you will use them in such small amounts that the resulting drinks are, by any North American or European standard, non-alcoholic.