First, a definition: A shrub isn’t just a holly bush planted by the driveway; it’s also a tart vinegar-based concoction for drinking. They were big in colonial America, and over the last decade, they’ve been gaining popularity in elite bartending circles. During the pandemic, people were missing their favorite cocktails. Liquor stores started stocking more shrubs to sell in cocktail kits, making home creation of fancy cocktails or mocktails as easy as pour and shake.
As Alex Zweber, who founded Northeast Minneapolis’s Sharab Shrubs in 2016, notes, “If you could just take aquavit and our pineapple, toasted coconut, and lime shrub and mix them together and get something pretty close to your old life—people loved that.” Zweber is on year five of getting shrub newbies to taste his wares. How’s it going? “Better!” says Zweber. “When I started, people mainly said, ‘Oh, you have a landscaping company?’ Now about half seem to know what they are. I think it’ll be like kombucha—in 10 years, no one will ever remember life before shrubs.”
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Photos by Caitlin Abrams
Cocktail
Make your own: Mix 1 ½ oz. gin, ¾ oz. lemon juice, ½ oz. Sharab Asian Pear Ginger Cinnamon shrub, and ¼ oz. maple syrup. Shake with ice, strain into glass, top with a dash of Angostura bitters, garnish with a cinnamon stick and orange peel.
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Strawberry Shrub
Sharab Strawberry Shrub:Add to cava for a mimosa variation bartenders call a ‘shrubmosa’; add half an ounce to bubbly water for a light sparkling water, or more for a soda-like treat.
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Tattersall Humdinger Shrub
Tattersall Humdinger Shrub: The Humdinger is a shrub made with fresh strawberry, fresh grapefruit, balsamic vinegar, and just enough rose water to make your whiskey sour fascinating.
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The Twisted Shrub
The Twisted Shrub: Northeast Minneapolis’s The Twisted Shrub bases its shrubs in apple cider vinegar and offers half a dozen options, including cranberry clementine and pineapple habanero. The team sells their wares locally and on Amazon.
Sugar, Spice, and Everything Nice
The Daisy cocktail is one of the building blocks of cocktail culture. Think margarita or lemon drop: a little sour, a little sweet, a little liquor. Shrubs bring the sweet and sour and add some spice too!
Cook It
Shrubs are, in their essence, flavored vinegars and can be used in any recipe that calls for vinegar and sweetness. Think vinaigrette with a strawberry shrub and mustard, deglazing a pan with an Asian pear vinegar cinnamon shrub, or cooking salmon with a glaze of a tropical shrub and maple syrup.
Switchel
St. Paul’s Hobby Farmer makes the other vinegar-based drink, switchel
St. Paul’s Hobby Farmer makes the other vinegar-based drink, switchel. Switchel fans appreciate the local honey, fresh ginger, and peppy vinegar. “Switchel is something I’ve been brewing since the mid-’70s,” says co-founder Jeff Cerise. “As a young rock singer in the Phones, if you remember them, I couldn’t even talk after certain gigs, my throat was so rough. My mom was this hippie housewife doing yoga and making switchel. She mixed some up, said, ‘Drink.’ It fixed me up and kept me on the road another 15 years.” This winter, Hobby Farmer is releasing hard switchel in liquor stores statewide to join its popular nonalcoholic switchel. Both are gluten-free, tart, and the drink of all rock stars and hippie housewives?
