I do love shrubs in the summer. I’ve a soda fiend, I’ll admit it. I love the acidic bite of fizzy soda type drinks.

The joy of shrubs is that soda is easy to replicate, what with the vinegar in the drink. I do tend to mix my shrubs into sparkling water or seltzer. If I feel extra exciting, I’ll break out the rum. But these are certainly lovely without it.

If you do a raw style shrub, you can certainly use a raw apple cider vinegar but it’ll shift the taste. I like to do the cooked shrubs with berries so they release much of the juice as I can get out of them so I use white vinegar, since heat will ruin the fermented qualities of the raw vinegar.

If you don’t have dried mint, use fresh-I really should have, but I have piles of dried mint. If you don’t like mint, use basil.

You can cook down the fruit before or after you let your shrub sit. I did it after for this batch.

Herbal Blueberry Shrub

1 pint blueberries

1/4 cup raw sugar

1 cup(ish) white vinegar

dried mint-a really large pinch (two teaspoons, maybe?)

In a clean glass jar, add the sugar, mint, and berries. Add enough vinegar to completely cover the berries.

Shrubs can handle a long sit, so leave your jar in the fridge for up to a week so the vinegar fully infuses. Shrubs were an early form of food preservation, so no harm there.

Once it infuses as long as you would like, shake the jar well and add everything to a pot. Let the shrub cook down long enough that the berries start popping and releasing juice. Take off of heat, cool, and then strain.

Keep your finished shrub in the fridge.

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