Add one drop per 150 ml of drink, stir, and taste before adding another. A 330 ml can takes two. A drop into a glass is a seasoning, judged by taste; a pan of syrup is the other job, and it is measured in millilitres instead.
- Makes one glass, of anything you already drink
- Takes about a minute, most of it tasting
- You need a glass, a spoon, and the bottle
What you need
- A drink, hot or cold, already tasting the way you want it
- A bottle of Jerk Soda Flavour Drops, any flavour
- A spoon, for a cold drink
How to make it
- Start with the direction on the bottle: one drop per 150 ml. It holds for every flavour in the range, and it scales with the glass: one drop for every 150 ml in it, rounded to a whole drop.
- Size it to the glass in front of you. A flat white runs about 160 ml, which is one drop. A 250 ml glass or a 330 ml can is two, and a 500 ml can, or a tall glass built over ice at around 400 ml, is three. The Basedrop Builder counts it for whatever glass you slide it to.
- Sweeten first, on anything unsweetened. There is no sugar in the drop, so a spoon of syrup into cold soda water, or the sugar you already take in your coffee, goes in before the drop does, once the base already tastes right on its own.
- Put the drop into the liquid, never onto a finished drink. In a hot drink, wait until the hot part is made, the shot pulled, the tea steeped or the milk off the heat, then stir the drop through before anything else arrives. In a cold drink, in before you stir, not after. In anything carrying milk or cream, into the watery part first, before the fat arrives.
- Stir it through and taste before you reach for a second. You can always add another. You cannot take one back out.
- Two flavours in a glass is not twice the drops of one, so take them one at a time. Pick a lead and stir it through properly, then bring the second in until you can taste it sitting behind the first, and stop there before it catches up.
Why it works
There is no sugar and no sweetener in the bottle, so a drop alters what a glass tastes of and leaves how sweet it is exactly where it was. On a can, that is the whole point: whoever made the soda already settled how sweet it is, and the drop does not argue with that decision. A caramel drop in plain soda water smells like butterscotch and tastes of almost nothing, because a butterscotch soda was always a syrup drink with bubbles poured over it, and the sugar was doing half the work.
Where the drop goes in follows a rule baking already knows: wet ingredients combine before fat gets involved. A drop moves through water and sugar on its own, but it will not move through cream or ice cream without help, which is why it goes into the espresso before the milk reaches it and into the soda water before the cream does. On something already frozen it stays exactly where it lands, and the first spoonful takes the whole of it, so leave a scoop of ice cream alone rather than seasoning it after the fact, and in a shake add it with the blender already running.
A glass is flavoured by the drop, tasting as you go. A batch of syrup is measured in millilitres, because nobody is standing over it tasting each drink it pours.
Where it comes from
A soda jerk built each drink to order and by taste, which is the job a bottle that asks you to taste and adjust is still doing. The soda jerk story has the history.
Make it yours
- Gone too far. Top it up with more of whatever was already in the glass: more cola, more milk, more coffee. Reaching for a second flavour to cover the first only builds a third drink nobody was trying to make.
- Want it the same twice. Turn the bottle into a syrup instead, with How to make a flavoured syrup: a simple or rich syrup with a measured teaspoon of flavour in the batch, because a written recipe has to come out the same way each time.
- A foam is the other place the bottle goes in neat rather than as a syrup, for its own reasons. How to make flavoured creams and foams has those.
Notes
Getting it wrong costs a taste, not a bottle.
A drop is used as it goes in. Nothing here is made ahead, and there is nothing to keep.
Allergens and warnings. Every bottle carries its own direction for use and its own list of what is in it, and those, not this page, are what count.