The base

How to Make Lavender Simple Syrup

The four-ingredient lavender simple syrup to make at home, with butterfly pea for a natural blue that turns pink with citrus. Our bottled version is made differently, and this explains how.

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 lavandin: earthier and warmer than English lavender, less perfume and more herb, and bolder with it, 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 gives it colour. It adds almost no flavour, just a deep natural pigment and a trick: it is pH sensitive. Made this way, with no acid in the pan, the syrup sets a deep blue, and a squeeze of lemon or a splash of tonic blooms it to pink. No dye, just chemistry.

How our bottle differs

The Bench & Bloom bottle is not this recipe. Ours is built to sit on a shelf rather than in your fridge, so it is made richer and carries a little citric acid. That acid holds the butterfly pea at the red end of its range from the start, which is why the bottle pours a deep ruby instead of blue.

You do not lose the colour trick, you gain the other half of it. Because our syrup starts acidic, it runs backwards when it meets something closer to neutral. Stir it into warm milk and it blooms from ruby to a soft lavender violet. That is the Lavender Milk, and it is the one we would pour you first.

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 lavender, Lavandula × intermedia ‘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.

First batch coming soon