How to Make Homemade Coffee Syrups at Home

When we added Sips on the Square, our little coffee shop inside The Market by Midwest Prime, we knew immediately that we wanted to make our own syrups.

The Market is a small-town farm market in Oxford, Indiana, that grew out of our family farm, Midwest Prime Farms. We raise our own beef and pork, and The Market has really become an extension of how we like to eat at home—good food, real ingredients and knowing a little more about where your food comes from.

We bake from scratch. We cook from scratch. We raise our own meat, and so much of what we sell at The Market is made without a bunch of preservatives or artificial ingredients. So when we started serving coffee, making our own syrups just felt like a natural extension of what we were already doing.

We said we'd start simple.

Vanilla. Caramel. Mocha. The basics.

Well, that didn't last long.

At any given time now, we probably have a dozen or more house-made syrups and sauces behind the coffee bar. Some are staples that never leave, and others change with the seasons. We've made everything from blueberry and lavender to blackberry sage, brown sugar fig, caramelized pumpkin and apple butter.

We've had some really good ones.

And we've definitely had some failures.

The good news is that making coffee syrup at home is actually really easy. You don't need fancy equipment or ingredients, and once you learn the basics, you can start experimenting with just about anything.

Why Make Your Own Coffee Syrup?

For us, the biggest reason is simply the ingredients—and the taste.

When we make blueberry syrup, we're using actual blueberries. Strawberry starts with real strawberries. Our blackberry sage syrup uses real blackberries and sage. We use vanilla bean paste in our vanilla, real pumpkin in our pumpkin sauce and actual apples when we make apple butter.

We've even made a PB&J latte using a house-made peanut butter sauce and strawberry jam we made ourselves.

We also use local raw honey in some of our drinks.

There is just a difference in flavor when you're using real ingredients instead of trying to recreate those flavors artificially.

It also gives us the freedom to play around with what's in season. We can make pumpkin and apple flavors in the fall, berries in the summer and come up with something completely different whenever inspiration strikes.

The Basic Homemade Coffee Syrup Formula

If you've never made a coffee syrup before, start simple.

A basic simple syrup is equal parts sugar and water.

Basic Simple Syrup

• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup water

Combine the sugar and water in a heavy saucepan and heat until the sugar has dissolved.

That's it.

From there, you can start adding flavors.

For vanilla, we make the basic syrup and add vanilla bean paste.

Caramel starts very similarly, but we cook it longer to develop that deeper caramel flavor.

Fruit syrups are generally:

• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup water
• 1 cup fruit

We use either fresh or frozen fruit. Let everything simmer together, breaking down the fruit as it cooks. I like to mash the fruit really well to get as much flavor out of it as possible and then strain the finished syrup through a fine-mesh strainer.

The exact recipe and cooking time will vary depending on what you're making. Some flavors also end up being more of a sauce than a true syrup. Our mocha, pumpkin and some of the richer flavors are thicker, especially once they cool.

That's part of the fun of it. Once you understand the basic idea, you really can experiment.

What You Need to Make Coffee Syrup at Home

You really don't need much.

A heavy saucepan, measuring cups, a good spoon and something to store your finished syrup in will get you started.

If you're making fruit syrups, I definitely recommend having a fine-mesh strainer.

One thing I do recommend is having good bottles to store your finished syrups in. We use these glass pump bottles behind the coffee bar at Sips. They look nice and are easy to use. We also like these plastic bottles for quick use. They're easy to keep organized, and since we usually have quite a few flavors going at once, being able to label and date everything is important.

That's about it. No special coffee-shop equipment required.

Creating New Flavors Takes Some Trial and Error

This might be my favorite part of making our own syrups.

It's also occasionally the most frustrating.

We experiment a lot. Some syrups turn out great on the first try. Others get adjusted several times.

And some never make it to the menu at all.

This fall I really wanted to make a brown butter pumpkin syrup. It tasted SO good.

Then we put it in an iced latte.

Once that butter got cold, it separated and rose to the top of the drink. We ended up with this layer of yellow butter floating on top of an otherwise perfectly good iced latte.

Not exactly appealing to the eye.

Unfortunately, that one had to go. It would probably be wonderful in a hot latte, but it wasn't going to work for what we needed.

Cherry has been my other nemesis.

I have wanted to make a cherry syrup so badly. I've tried several recipes and just about every way I can think of to make it work.

The syrup itself can taste great.

Then we add espresso and the cherry disappears.

Which brings me to probably one of the biggest things I've learned from developing our drinks:

Don't just taste the syrup. Taste it in the drink you're actually going to make.

Your Coffee Makes a Difference

We use an Indiana-roasted coffee bean that has a fairly strong espresso flavor, and we love it.

But that also means our syrups have to be able to stand up to the espresso.

A delicate syrup might taste amazing by itself and then completely disappear once you add espresso and milk. That's one of the reasons we test and adjust so much.

We've settled on 1.25 ounces of syrup in our 16-ounce lattes and 1.75 ounces in our 24-ounce lattes.

That's simply what tastes right to us with our espresso. If you're making coffee at home, start with less and adjust it to your taste and the strength of your coffee.

And Sometimes Cold Foam Saves the Day

We make our own cold foam at Sips too, and this is another one of those things that's much easier to make at home than you might think.

We use the heavy cream we sell at The Market and add a couple pumps of one of our house-made syrups. Then we whip it in this little cold foam maker.

That's really it.

And once you have your homemade syrups, you can make just about any flavor of cold foam you want.

Sometimes we'll use cold foam to reinforce a flavor that isn't quite strong enough in the coffee itself. If we're making a toffee latte, for example, and the toffee is getting a little lost behind the espresso, we can use toffee syrup in the latte and make a toffee cold foam for the top.

Blueberry cold foam. Lavender cold foam. Blackberry sage cold foam. Caramel. Vanilla. Pumpkin.

Once you have the syrup made, you have a lot of options.

Some “Seasonal” Flavors Refused to Leave

When we first started experimenting with different flavors, I assumed some would come and go with the seasons.

Blueberry was one of those.

Lavender was another.

Apparently our customers had other plans.

Both have become staples for us year-round.

Caramel is always popular because it's familiar and safe, but I've been surprised by how much people enjoy some of the more unusual flavors too.

Right now, depending on the season, you might find things like vanilla, caramel, brown sugar, mocha, cinnamon toast, brown sugar fig, caramelized pumpkin, blackberry sage, blueberry, strawberry, raspberry and lavender behind our counter.

We also make our own chai.

And I'm always experimenting with something.

What About Sugar-Free Coffee Syrups?

We make a few of our syrups sugar-free as well.

We use Swerve to make a sugar-free simple syrup and then build the flavor from there.

Because the sugar substitute is considerably more expensive, we don't make every flavor sugar-free. We generally stick with the basics like vanilla, brown sugar and mocha.

But if you're making syrups at home, it's absolutely something you can experiment with.

How We Store Our Homemade Syrups

We date all of our bottles so we know when each batch was made.

Fruit syrups stay refrigerated all the time. The basic syrups such as vanilla, caramel and brown sugar may stay out on the counter while we're open because we're constantly using them, but they go back into refrigeration when we're closed.

One of my favorite tricks is freezing extra syrup.

We'll make a larger batch and freeze it in smaller containers. Then we can pull out what we need and thaw it as we go.

This is especially helpful at home because you're probably not going through syrup at the same rate as a coffee shop.

Instead of making a tiny batch every week, make a larger batch, divide it up and freeze some for later.

Coffee Syrup Isn't Just for Coffee

This is another reason I love having homemade syrups around.

At The Market, we use them for a lot more than lattes.

We use our fruit syrups in our fresh-squeezed lemonade. We'll add lavender to lemonade or an Arnold Palmer. We use syrups in our fizzes, which are our version of a flavored or dirty soda.

Our mocha makes a great hot chocolate.

You can flavor cold foam with them.

And several of them would be great in cocktails or mocktails too.

Once you've got a bottle in the refrigerator, you'll start finding all kinds of uses for it.

Start With One

If you've never made coffee syrup before, don't start by trying to recreate the dozen bottles we have sitting behind our coffee bar.

Make vanilla.

It's sugar, water and vanilla bean paste. That's a pretty safe place to start.

Then try blueberry.

Or strawberry.

Once you understand the basic process, start playing around with herbs, spices and seasonal ingredients. Some experiments will be fantastic. Some might leave you with butter floating on top of your latte.

That's part of it.

And fair warning:

Once you start making your own coffee syrups, you're not going to want to buy a Starbucks coffee ever again.

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