Improve Your Non-Alcoholic Negroni With a Custom Negroni Syrup

A bitter, citrusy, spice-packed syrup to add flavor, texture, and intensity to your NA Negroni.

In last week’s newsletter on non-alcoholic cocktails, I lamented that the stirred-and-boozy, winter-friendly drinks that many cocktail enthusiasts, myself included, gravitate toward, just don’t work all that well in the NA format.

There are a lot of great non-alcoholic drinks out there. But NA cocktails promising to replicate the sensation of a Martini, Manhattan, or Old Fashioned rarely deliver the goods.

The kinda-sorta-maybe exception is the NA Negroni, or Nogroni: “kinda-sorta” because the best NA Negroni is the Phony Negroni, a canned, carbonated, bitter-soda-like drink from St. Agrestis.

Even though NA versions of gin, sweet vermouth, and Campari-style red bitters exist, mixing them with nothing else, like you would in a boozy Negroni, just doesn’t produce the same effect. I’ve never loved any NA cocktail consisting solely and exclusively of non-alcoholic spirits, with no other ingredients. The three-bottle, mixed-in-the-moment, single-serve all-NA spirit versions just don’t quite do it for me. They are too thin, too delicate, too underpowered. They lack the rich, dynamic contrast of elements you get in a traditional Negroni.

I have come to believe, however, that you can substantially improve a three-bottle NA Negroni by adding one single ingredient¹—a homemade syrup that adds bitterness, spice, citrus, a little bit of heat, and some viscosity, all of which make it taste and feel more like a boozy Negroni.

I want to be clear: I say “improve” and not “perfect” for a reason.

This technique still does not deliver an NA Negroni that is indistinguishable from its boozy counterpart, or that hits in exactly the same way. I don’t think it’s possible with current technology.

Instead, we want to advance Nogroni science, expanding the the possibility space by using a culinary technique to move closer to a more recognizably Negroni-like experience. The specialized syrup we are going to make adds bitterness, spice-rack complexity, texture, and an overall intensity that makes your NA Negroni noticeably more Negroni-esque.

So this week…

• We are going to discuss gin, Campari, and what, exactly, makes a Negroni taste and feel like a Negroni.

• And then we are going to make a unique syrup—a bitter Negroni syrup—that helps emphasize some of those Negroni-ish elements in an non-alcoholic version using NA spirits.

The Three

Remember the hack screenplay pitch in the great, weird Nicolas Cage movie, Adaptation?

In the movie, Cage plays two identical twin screenwriter brothers, one of whom takes a screenwriting course and then decides to write a serial killer movie called The Three, referring to the killer, his victim, and the cop on his trail.

The twist, he explains, is that the killer is actually insane, and they’re all the same person.

A Negroni is sort of like that.

An everyday Negroni consists of three elements: gin, sweet vermouth, and Campari. Each brings unique characteristics to the drink, but in the end, they all come together in a pleasing, three-part whole.

In the madness of a Negroni, the twist is, they’re all the same drink.

So before we try to hack a non-alcoholic version, let’s think about what each of those three elements bring to the drink.

Gin is obviously a wide and varied category, but most basic Negronis are made with some sort of London dry gin, like Ford’s or Beefeater, and the signature element of London dry gin is juniper. Some gins are much more juniper forward, some less so, but if you want to capture the vibe of gin in a single element, it’s juniper.

Sweet vermouth brings a syrupy sweetness to the mix, as well as a spice rack flavor profile that varies considerably between brands and bottles. But for our purposes, it’s that syrup texture that we want to focus on, the viscosity and body that sweet vermouth adds to the experience. Sweet vermouth doesn’t just change how a Negroni tastes. It changes how it feels.

And then there’s Campari. Campari is something of a mystery. There is no official public information about what, exactly, is in it, though it’s said to be made from a combination of 68 fruits, herbs, and spices, many of which are unknown.

Still, most descriptions of its flavor profile agree on some of the key elements, which include:

• Bitterness from gentian root, a bitter root that is used in a number of bitter liqueurs, including Salers and Suze

• Rhubarb, a tart vegetable with edible stalks

• Orange, specifically bitter orange, likely from orange peels

Finally, and importantly, each of these ingredients brings a certain amount of alcohol, which in a Negroni expresses itself as a sort of warming kick, just a little bit of heat mixed in with the cacophony of other flavors.

The trick for our NA Negroni, then, is to get all that into a syrup. It’s easier than it sounds.

Getting Serious About Syrup

I have sometimes argued that the easiest way to impart novel flavors into a cocktail is with a custom syrup.

In most cases this is done via single-flavor syrups—say, cinnamon syrup or vanilla syrup, both of which are often found in tiki drinks.