According to the Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) data, 4.5 million tonnes of edible food waste is thrown away in the UK annually. Making sustainable cocktails at home is a big step to become more conscious and focus on reducing the wastes your drinks can produce. Here are a few tips for how to make great eco-friendly cocktails at home.
Choose Local
Try using seasonal locally grown fruits and herbs to garnish your mixed drinks. Apples, cherries, strawberries, raspberries, fresh mint, basil, etc. can make a great garnish and complement your cocktails delivering fresh and fruity flavors.
Buying spirits from local producers not only helps to reduce your environmental footprint, but also supports small local businesses, and we all know how important it is in these uncertain times. Here are few UK spirit producers that make amazing alcohol and also help to develop local communities and implement sustainable methods of spirits production.
Sapling Spirits — for each bottle of Sapling vodka you buy, they will plant a tree. Sapling Spirits have teamed up with the Food Waste Project who helps hospitality businesses to become zero waste.
Victory London Distillery use cutting-edge technology to reduce water waste and conserve energy. Victory Distillery have launched their refill cans that are plastic-free, aluminum, infinitely recyclable, and lightweight. Join the refill revolution!
Warner’s Distillery champion sustainability at each step of production of their farm-grown gins: from-locally sourced ingredients and looking after over a million honeybees up to responsible sourcing and waste management.
Cooper King Distillery is an eco-friendly distillery that runs on 100% green energy. Cooper King is the first distillery in England to produce carbon-negative gin.
Brighton Gin is a small batch gin producer. Every bottle of Brighton Gin is filled, waxed and labeled by hand. Brighton gin is the UK’s first vegan-certified gin, including not only the liquid but the packaging.
Find out more about great sustainable spirit producers in our blog post. Buy independent local spirits online from Lassou.
Drink Shrubs
Shrubs are amazing. They can help you to elevate your cocktails and deliver complex and balanced tastes. Shrubs have unique bold flavours, and they add exclusive aromas to many cocktails. Their taste is so diverse that they can make a great alternative to fruits, herbs, and other garnish ingredients.
Here is our favorite shrub cocktail:
Ingredients:
- 35ml gin
- 50ml pomegranate juice
- 25ml Wild Hedgerow & Rose Shrub
- 20ml lemon juice
Method:
Pour ingredients into a cocktail shaker, add the ice, shake it well and strain into a glass. Garnish with apple slices and enjoy!
Check out our choice of Nonsuch shrubs and buy shrubs online at Lassou.
No More Plastic
If you still buy plastic cocktails straws, now is the high time to stop doing that. There is a huge number of sustainable straws you can use instead of plastic. For example, reusable straws made from bamboo, stainless steel, silicon, compostable plant-based straws, and so on. Sustainable straws are a great option for your home bar as you can use them many and many times.
Keep Those Peels
Don’t throw in trash lemons and oranges once you squeezed them. You can use the peel to make garnishes or Oleo Saccharum for your next drinks. Oleo Saccharum is oil that is extracted from citrus peels. To make it, take citrus peels and place them in a bowl, add sugar (150g of sugar for 200g of peels) and stir to fully coat the peels. You are almost there, the next thing you need to do is… wait for at least 6 hours until sugar dissolves and Oleo Saccharum is ready. Pour it into the bottle, and enjoy in cocktails (works great in Old Fashioned and Negroni), or baking.
Wine Syrup? Wine Not?
Turn the oxidized wine into a delicious wine syrup to complement your cocktails. Mix it with sugar (a good ratio is 3 cups wine to 1 cup sugar), and bring it to boil. Then reduce heat and simmer until the liquid turns syrupy and lower to approximately a third in volume. That’s it, your homemade wine syrup is ready.
Let it cool, pour it into a bottle and refrigerate. You can also flavor the wine syrup with vanilla extract, cinnamon or ginger by adding them after cooling the liquid. Use white wine syrups in refreshing gin cocktails and red wine syrups in rum and whisky cocktails to add some complexity.
These easy steps will help you to minimize food waste when making cocktails without loss of taste. Enjoy your drinks responsibly!