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Simple Syrup - Cold Process
Granulated Sugar, 12 lbs.; Water, 1 gallon.
This will produce almost 2 gallons simple syrup.
Put sugar in a stone crock, pour on the water, and agitate with wooden paddle until sugar is entirely dissolved.
A fountain-scale batch of bar syrup, mixed without heat. The whole trick is patience: cold water dissolves that much sugar slowly, and stopping early leaves you with a thin syrup and a bed of undissolved grains.
- The hinge: dissolve it completelyCold water will take up this much sugar, but not quickly. Expect to come back and stir over the better part of an hour, and hold the batch a few hours before drawing from it so the last crystals go. Any sugar left on the bottom means the syrup above it is weaker than intended.
- Scaling it downThe ratio is 12 lb sugar to 1 gallon water, roughly 1.4 parts sugar to 1 part water by weight. A household batch at one-eighth scale: 1 1/2 lb (about 3 1/3 cups) granulated sugar to 2 cups water, which yields just under 1 quart of syrup.
- Why cold process at allBoiling a syrup drives off water and darkens it slightly, and, especially in the presence of acid, can invert some of the sucrose into glucose and fructose, which tastes marginally sweeter and reads differently in a delicate fruit soda. Cold mixing is said to give a cleaner, more neutral syrup.
- DensityThis is a heavy syrup, working out to roughly 59 percent sugar by weight, or somewhere around 30-32 degrees Baume, the range fountain manuals generally called for. It is denser than the equal-parts syrup most bars use now, so substituting it one-for-one into a modern drink recipe will oversweeten.
- The stone crockAny non-reactive vessel works: a stainless pot, a food-grade plastic bucket, a glass jar. The point of stoneware and a wooden paddle was that neither corroded nor flavored the syrup. Do not use bare aluminum or copper.
- Keeping itCold-process syrup is never pasteurized, so it carries whatever yeast and mold spores came in on the sugar and equipment. Refrigerate it, keep the container covered, and discard at the first sign of cloudiness, gas, or surface film. A boiled syrup keeps noticeably longer, which was the trade-off the old fountains accepted.
- YieldJust under 2 gallons at full scale, or about 250 servings at an ounce of syrup per glass.
Soda fountain work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rested on two staples: carbonated water and plain sugar syrup, everything else being flavoring extract, fruit, cream, or acid added by the glass. Trade manuals like this one often printed both a hot and a cold formula for the syrup, and the two were said to have their partisans: the hot process was faster and kept better, the cold process was held to give a purer, less "cooked" sweetness for fruit and phosphate drinks. The stone crock and wooden paddle here are the ordinary furniture of a working fountain's back room, chosen because neither would taint the syrup or be attacked by it. Twelve pounds to the gallon puts this near the density fountains measured with a Baume hydrometer, a habit inherited from pharmacy, with which soda dispensing had close ties.