How To Make Your Own Tonic Water - Delicious Magazine

Here at delicious. HQ we often have cocktails on Friday afternoon (bosses: try it, it works wonders for morale).

This Friday it’s gonna be gin and tonic. Not just any gin and tonic, though. We’re using my homemade tonic water – or, to be precise, homemade tonic syrup, topped up with soda water.

You may be wondering why anyone would want to bother making their own tonic water when they can just buy it.

I can guarantee you there’s no saccharine or unnamed ‘flavourings’ in it. And I’ve wanted to make it ever since I visited the 214 Bermondsey gin bar near our offices and tried their highly flavoursome concoction.

At first I assumed making tonic would be difficult and complicated, well beyond my abilities. In fact it’s one of the simplest things I’ve ever made, hardly more complicated than a properly brewed pot of tea.

That said, getting the ingredients requires a bit of online research – you won’t find citric acid or cinchona bark next to the boxes of Tetley in the corner shop.

Citric acid is readily available online – I bought a 250g bag for just £1.90 on Ebay, including delivery, and you only need 6.5g per batch for this recipe. Should last a while. Just make sure it’s described as ‘food grade’.

More expensive and not so readily available is the cinchona bark. What the hell is that? I hear you ask. The cinchona tree is indigenous to the Andes and its bark has been used for hundreds of years to treat malaria. Have a good Google and you’ll find some. The key is you want it cut, not powdered.

The existence of gin and tonic is thanks to cinchona bark. The Brits grew the trees in their colonies in India, Asia and Africa. To help the daily dose of the extremely bitter extracted quinine go down, so the story goes, they added sugar, lemon juice and gin.

There are lots of recipes for tonic syrup online. As far as I can gather, it all started in 2008 with a recipe from Jeffrey Morgenthaler in Portland, Oregon, the USA’s most hipster-ish city, where doing stuff like making your own tonic water is hardly worth talking about, it’s so commonplace. Over there, they’ve probably moved on to growing the cinchona trees in their gardens.

The recipes often call for citrus zest and/or juice, lemongrass, allspice, lavender… Did I really need all that stuff in my tonic, I wondered. After all, isn’t that what the botanicals in the gin are for? And I always have a wedge of lemon or lime in it anyway.