30-Minute Simple Strawberry Syrup for Drinks

Looking to add a touch of sweetness and fruity flavor to your favorite beverages? This homemade simple strawberry syrup is one of my favorite ways to jazz up cocktails or add a splash of flavor to club soda, tonic, and iced tea too! It's also great on pancakes and waffles, tbh.

Made with fresh strawberries, lemon peel, and sugar, this easy-to-follow simple syrup recipe is a great way to add a burst of strawberry flavor to your favorite drinks.

I often make this berry concentrate for beverages when I want to use up some wrinkled strawberries before they go bad. It's a great strawberry sweetener, perfect for adding a splash of flavor to your usual drinks.

I made this strawberry simple syrup for the first time in pastry school and loved it so much I knew I had to start making it at home, too. When we bought a SodaStream, it quickly became one of our favorite ways to add flavor to the carbonated water.

The other reason I started making this simple strawberry syrup for beverages is because, quite frankly, I think I'm cursed when it comes to buying strawberries.

Within a day of bringing them home, they're shriveling and wrinkly and not super appetizing to eat. But they're not moldy, either. So I started taking those wrinkled strawberries and turning them into this simple strawberry syrup for drinks. It's so easy and it extends the shelf life of the strawberries by at least a week or two!

MAKING MY Strawberry drink syrup

Cooking the strawberries and lemon peels before adding water allows them to start breaking down and releasing their juices. The oils in the lemon peel warm up and start mingling with the natural sugars in the strawberries.

When the water is added, it quickly sucks all the flavor and color out of the strawberries. Bringing the water to a boil and reducing it then intensifies the flavor, making a concentrated strawberry-lemon juice. And when you add the sugar and bring it back to a boil, that thickens the juice into a thick, pourable syrup.

While the lemon peels add some lemon flavor to the syrup, I also like to add a squeeze of lemon juice at the end for a bit of tartness and to intensify the flavor of the berries.

I always stir the strawberry mixture as it boils to prevent anything from sticking to the bottom of the pot. My goal is for the water to reduce by about half during this time.

Gently stir and lift the berries in the strainer to release the juices. Do NOT press the berries through the strainer. You ONLY want the juice, not the berry pulp. If you get any pulp in there, it will ferment and you don't want that.

Weigh the strained strawberry juice before adding sugar. You can do this as you strain it, or wipe out the pot and weigh the juice in the pot since it will go back on the stove later anyway.

My strawberry syrup recipe uses a 1:1 ratio of equal parts strawberry juice and sugar, and the amount of juice will vary based on how much the water reduced.

My goal is to end up with about 5 ounces of strawberry juice since I start with 10 ounces of water. But "reduced by half" is hard to eyeball, and you might end up with slightly more or less.

Weighing the juice before adding sugar is the only way to know how much sugar the syrup needs so it thickens to the right consistency!

I stir the juice and sugar together in the pot off the heat to make sure the sugar isn't clumped together, then put the pot back over high heat and do not stir. I want the sugar crystals to dissolve, and sugar crystals love trying to reform their crystalline shape.

Stirring the water and sugar together once the pot is on the stove will fling sugar crystals up the wall of the pot and the spoon, encouraging recrystallization in the syrup.

To clean any sugar crystals clinging to the walls of the pot, I dip a pastry brush in water and brush it along the inner walls of the pot as the syrup heats up. This dissolves the sugar crystals gently so the syrup is smooth and syrupy, not crystallized!

Once I'm sure there's no sugar crystals on the walls of the pot, I crank the heat to high and bring the strawberry syrup to a boil.

And when I say "bring it to a boil," I do mean a vigorous boil. I don't set a timer until I'm seeing bubbles across at least 75% of the surface of the syrup.

At that point I reduce the heat a little bit (e.g. from high to medium) to maintain a rapid boil for one minute. Again, I DO NOT STIR.

Sugar absorbs heat really well; it will continue boiling even with the heat slightly reduced. Reducing the heat slightly at this step helps prevent the sugar temp from getting too hot and turning into hard candy.

After 60 seconds of boiling, I set it aside to cool. Only then is it safe to stir. The syrup will seem quite loose and liquid when it's hot, but will thicken into a more syrup-like consistency as it cools.

I used to feel super guilty about throwing away the pale, wrinkled strawberry pieces after using them to make my strawberry juice. It seemed wasteful! But you shouldn't feel that way.

The strawberries have done their job. They're gross and pale and flavorless at that point; there's nothing more they can give you. We've given them new life and purpose as this berry syrup, which will last a good two weeks longer than the berries would have on their own.

Practical Tips & Recipe Notes

• When you strain the strawberries and lemon peel out of the water DO NOT PRESS THEM THROUGH THE STRAINER. Just let the water strain out on its own. You can lift and stir the strawberries in the strainer to get more liquid out, but you do not want to press them through into the water. If you strain the fruit pulp through your syrup will ferment and you don't want that. I made this mistake once and the pressure of gas building up in the bottle sprayed syrup all over my kitchen when I opened it.
• If you don't have a pastry brush, a folded-up piece of paper towel dipped in water will work to melt the sugar crustals in the pot instead.
• Use a pot with PLENTY of room to spare. Sugar absorbs and retains heat really well so will keep cooking for a bit even once you turn off the heat. You want to give it room to get bubbly and rise up in the pot a bit. And you definitely don't want to splash any hot sugar on your skin. I recommend using a pot that has at least 3x the room needed for the syrup itself.
• For a thicker syrup that's closer to the consistency of corn syrup or a thick maple syrup to pour over pancakes or ice cream, you can use a 1:2 ratio of strawberry juice to sugar. But if you're making this strawberry syrup for drinks, you'll want to stick to the 1:1 ratio.

📖 Recipe