Here's How To Booze Up Your Maple Syrup For A Better Brunch

Brunch may have begun as a combination of breakfast and lunch, hence its portmanteau name, but these days it seems to have evolved into what is basically breakfast with booze. Generally, the alcohol comes in the form of drinks such as mimosas, bellinis, or bloody marys, but it's also possible to add booze to your food à la homemade breakfast stout muffins. If you're brunching at home and you plan on eating pancakes or waffles, you can even make boozy maple syrup to dress them with.

While we love a good internal rhyme as much as any other wordslingers, we're not going to refer to this syrup as "booze-infused" since it isn't. Yes, it has booze in it, but an infusion, in culinary terms, refers to soaking a solid in a liquid until it releases its flavor. It's what a tea bag does when it turns your hot water into tea. Boozed-up maple syrup, however, blends two liquids, so it's actually a mixture and not an infusion. 

To make it, all you need to do is heat up a cup of maple syrup and stir in about two tablespoons of whiskey or rum. If you'd like to eliminate any raw alcohol taste along with some of the actual alcohol, you can boil the booze before mixing it in. If you want your syrup as boozy as possible, though, add it to the warm syrup after you've removed the latter from the heat source.

Boozed-up syrup sounds like a natural fit for brunch, but it can also be an excellent ingredient for cooking and cocktails. You can use it as a sweetener in baking, swapping it out in any recipe that calls for regular maple syrup or honey, but that is just the beginning. Have you ever thought of adding maple syrup (boozy or otherwise) to your egg salad? Sounds weird, but tastes great. Maple syrup can also be used as a meat glaze or marinade, in barbecue sauce and salad dressings, or drizzled on vegetables like carrots, sweet potatoes, or Brussels sprouts. If you put your mind to it, you could probably add your boozy maple syrup to every single meal of the day.

Alcohol-enriched maple syrup can be an ingredient in numerous cocktails, as well. Some like to use maple in place of simple syrup in an old fashioned, and that extra little hint of booze (whether it be matching or contrasting) will only add to the flavor. It can also be added to bourbon and grapefruit juice to make a cocktail known as the American breakfast or a brown derby; mixed with Canadian whiskey, fernet, and bitters for a Toronto; or combined with cognac, gin, lemon juice, and bitters for a French Canadian. For a drink with just the merest hint of booze, however, you could also use the syrup in our tasty maple cream soda recipe. While these drinks may scream "fall vibes," maple trees are actually tapped anywhere from February to April so there's no reason the syrup can't be considered a year-round flavor.