The base

How to Make Lavender Simple Syrup

The four-ingredient lavender simple syrup behind every drink on this page, with butterfly pea for a natural blue that turns pink with citrus.

Ingredients

Makes About 1.5 cups (350 mL)

  • 1 cup water
  • 1 cup cane sugar
  • 1 to 2 teaspoons dried culinary lavender buds
  • 1 tablespoon dried butterfly pea flowers (for the natural blue)

Method

  1. Combine the water and sugar in a small saucepan over medium heat. Stir until the sugar dissolves.
  2. Bring just to a simmer, then take the pan off the heat.
  3. Stir in the lavender buds and butterfly pea flowers, cover, and steep. Start tasting at 5 minutes.
  4. The moment it reads floral and not sharp, strain out the buds and flowers through a fine sieve.
  5. Cool completely, then bottle and refrigerate. It will be a deep blue.

Lavender simple syrup is the base for every drink in this collection. It is four ingredients and about twenty minutes, and the only hard part is the steep.

A note on the lavender: use real culinary lavender buds, never essential oil, which is not safe to drink. We grow Grosso, a bold, aromatic variety, so we use the lighter end of the range. A softer English lavender can take a little more. Either way, taste as you go.

The butterfly pea flower is what makes it blue. It adds almost no flavour, just a deep natural colour and a trick: the blue is pH sensitive. Add a squeeze of lemon, a splash of tonic or a pour of sparkling wine and it blooms from blue to pink. No dye, just chemistry.

The one trick

Over-steeping is what turns lavender soapy. Start tasting at five minutes and stop the moment the syrup reads floral, before it turns sharp or medicinal. With a bold lavandin like Grosso that can be as little as five to seven minutes.

Store it in a sealed jar in the fridge for about a month. Or skip the steeping entirely: a bottle of Bench & Bloom is this syrup, already dialled in, with our own estate-grown Grosso.

Once you have a batch, pour it into a Naramata Sunset, a Lavender Gin Fizz or a Lavender Lemonade.

Skip the steeping. Ours is already dialled in.

Summer harvest, available mid-July