this is Chris from Barba and today we're going to show you how to bring some more flavor and acidity to cocktails by utilizing a product called a shrub so stay tuned so there's a few different ways that you can make a shrub and that's what we're going to do today we're going to examine three different techniques go through the entire process with all three techniques and at the end of about a week or so we'll take a look to see what's giving us the best results so the first technique is essentially warming-up vinegar to just slightly lessen boiling and then pouring them over the strawberries to extract as much flavor as possible we'll let that cool down and extract the flavor for a few days and then we'll separate the strawberries from the liquid and introduce a sugar to kind of start to bring down and tame down some of that acidity the next technique is more of a cold technique in which we will add sugar to our strawberries macerate them so the sugar will start to extract the flavor and the juice from strawberries and then we'll add the vinegar to that the last technique that we're going to do is the quick down and dirty we're going to throw everything in a blender blend it all up and then we're just going to allow it to sit for the entire time so that's what we're going to do from here on out we started our three different shrub techniques this one here is the cold cold technique so we've started our three different shrub techniques this one here is the cold technique and we're allowing the sugar and the strawberries to master it together and the sugar we'll go ahead and pull all those juices out that we want this one was a super fast technique which we just literally added everything no blender fired it up put it in a jar solids and all we're going to love that to set the entire time and this one here is the hot vinegar technique and we'll come back to all of these in a couple of days to show you some of the progress so here we are 24 hours later and you can see some big differences between some of the shrub techniques that we are utilizing with the cold shrub technique you can see that the sugar is pulled out a lot of water content from the strawberries and it's turned in more of a syrup than anything not much has changed with the pureed technique but that's not a big surprise and finally the hot vinegar shrub technique you can see that a lot of the color has started to infuse into the vinegar so what we'll do from here on out is I'm going to take with the solids from this one and add the vinegar because that's the only thing this one's missing the one that we pureed not much is going to change I'm just going to put this back in the fridge and with a hot vinegar I'm going to do the exact opposite as a cold technique so what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull out the solids and I can add sugar to help balance out some of that vinegar and then we'll let it sit in the fridge rater for a few days so here are the three different shrubs that we've made they've been refrigerator for about three or four days now to really integrate all the flavors together this one was the cold extraction technique that we utilized and you'll see it's both the lightest in color and and body as well the flavor is really really nice so it has kind of more of a fresh seasonal strawberry and it captures the the essence of it really good the acid on it the vinegar on it however is a little bit out of balance much more so on the vinegar side and I think a couple days in the fridge we'll definitely take the edge off of it and let the flavors really kind of integrate more but if it were me I'd probably take down the vinegar a little bit just in the next time I'd do it now the hot vinegar technique that we utilized you can see a much bigger color extraction out of it it's still got a nice clarity to it but the color is a lot more vibrant the mouthfeel on this is much denser and richer than the cold extraction and it has kind of a weight on the palate similar to like a simple syrup now the flavor is much different from the first this one here has much more of a cooked or candied strawberry profile and the first time I tried it it reminded me of candy I had when I was kid called Laffy Taffy so it's got that kind of flavor to it now the final one here I would probably recommend against it doesn't have a lot of clarity it kind of has a murky kind of look to it and the flavor is very very off you definitely get the essence of strawberry in there but it's much more so on the sweet side it's not balanced at all you might be able to try increasing the vinegar if you were going to do this again but you know it doesn't have the same kind of visual appeal that the other two syrups have so for me if I'm going to be lysing them in cocktails I'll definitely steer you towards these two techniques and at that point it's just a matter of the flavors that you want to capture if you want it to be a little bit more seasonal and fresh and vibrant I would definitely recommend utilizing a cold extraction technique if you're going for much more that candied kind of cooked preserve or even jam kind of taste to it I would recommend utilizing the the hot vinegar extraction technique so there you have it we've done three different shrubs and we'll have some more mixology focused videos in the future but until then I hope you guys have a great shift and Cheers if you enjoyed this video subscribe to our You Tube channel find us on google+ or visit us at a bar above calm