Deep red sparkling hibiscus cocktail in a champagne flute with a lemon twist, dried hibiscus flowers and rosemary on a dark wood table

Three Hibiscus Holiday Cocktails (and One Mocktail)

Search "hibiscus holiday cocktail" and you get a page of beautiful drinks, and nearly every one of them starts the same way: first, make a hibiscus syrup. Buy dried flowers, simmer them with sugar, add a cinnamon stick, cool it, strain it, refrigerate it, use it within two weeks. It's a good syrup. It's also a half-hour project standing between you and a drink you wanted to hand someone at the door.

We bottle ours, so you can skip that part. The from-scratch version is at the bottom of this post anyway, if you'd rather make it. It isn't a secret.

One thing to know first: our syrup isn't only hibiscus. It's hibiscus and lavender, both steeped as whole flowers. Hibiscus on its own is tart, almost cranberry-like, and a lot of holiday recipes reach for elderflower liqueur to soften it. The lavender in our bottle does that job already. It sits underneath the hibiscus and rounds it off, so you don't need a second bottle to make the drink taste finished. That also explains why the drink comes out looking like cranberry and tasting brighter than it. It's the color of the season without the sweetness of a punch bowl.

Why hibiscus belongs in December

People think of hibiscus as a summer flavor because most of the recipes are iced tea. But look at what bartenders actually do with it in winter: spritzes, sparkling wine cocktails, whiskey sours, mulled mocktails. Hibiscus is tart and it's red, and in a season built on cranberries and pomegranates, a tart red drink in a flute is exactly right. It reads festive before anyone tastes it.

All three recipes below use three quarters of an ounce of syrup, which is the same pour as the margarita on the bottle. It's a little less than you'd use of a plain simple syrup, because the flowers do some of the work sugar usually does.

1. Sparkling Hibiscus (the one to make for a crowd)

This is the drink from the top of that search page, minus the half hour of prep. A hibiscus prosecco cocktail, one flute at a time or by the pitcher.

What you'll need

How to make it

  1. Pour the syrup and lemon juice into a chilled flute.
  2. Top slowly with the sparkling wine. It will foam more than you expect. Pour it down the side of the glass.
  3. Give it one gentle stir from the bottom so the syrup lifts. Don't stir it like a cocktail; you'll knock the bubbles out.
  4. Twist the lemon peel over the top and drop it in.

For a party, batch it. One bottle of prosecco fills six flutes. Stir 4½ oz of syrup and 1½ oz of lemon juice together in a small pitcher ahead of time, keep it in the fridge, and pour about an ounce into each flute before the wine goes in. That's the whole job. No shaker, no ice, and nobody is standing at the counter making drinks one at a time while the food gets cold.

2. Hibiscus Bourbon Sour (the one for after dinner)

The other shape hibiscus takes in winter is a whiskey drink. Tart, a little floral, served over one big piece of ice. Most versions online build a spiced syrup with cinnamon and cloves to get there. Two dashes of bitters do the same thing in two seconds.

What you'll need

How to make it

  1. Add everything except the orange peel to a shaker with ice.
  2. Shake hard for about ten seconds, until the outside of the shaker frosts.
  3. Strain over a large ice cube in a rocks glass.
  4. Squeeze the orange peel over the drink, skin side down, so the oil hits the surface. Then drop it in.

If you'd rather have it with rye, use rye. The lavender gets along with the spice in rye a little better than the bourbon, honestly, but bourbon is what most people have on the shelf in December.

3. Hibiscus Ginger Sparkler (no alcohol, and nobody will feel left out)

Every holiday table has someone not drinking, and the usual answer is cranberry juice and seltzer. This is better than that by a wide margin, and it looks like the other two drinks in the glass, which matters more than people admit.

What you'll need

How to make it

  1. Fill a tall glass with ice.
  2. Add the syrup and lime juice, then top with ginger beer.
  3. Stir once. Slap the rosemary sprig against your palm before you put it in, which is what releases the smell.

The syrup pour is a touch heavier here because ginger beer is sharp and there's no spirit to carry the flavor. If your ginger beer is on the sweet side, drop back to ¾ oz.

How much syrup

Three quarters of an ounce is the pour on all the cocktails, and it's the same pour our own margarita recipe uses. From there, half an ounce if you like your drinks dry, a full ounce if you're used to bar cocktails, which are sweeter than most people think. Past an ounce the hibiscus stops being a flavor and starts being a color.

If you'd rather make the syrup yourself

Fair. Here it is:

  1. 1 cup water and 1 cup cane sugar in a small pot. Heat until the sugar dissolves. It doesn't need to boil.
  2. Off the heat, add ¼ cup dried hibiscus flowers and 1 tablespoon dried culinary lavender.
  3. Steep 15 minutes. Not longer. Hibiscus keeps getting more tart the longer it sits, and lavender turns soapy.
  4. Strain, bottle, refrigerate. Use it within about two weeks.

Two honest differences with ours. The first is the lavender: get the culinary kind, not the kind sold for drawers, and measure it carefully, because a little too much ruins the batch. The second is the two weeks. A jar of homemade syrup is a small deadline sitting in your refrigerator, and most of them get poured out half full sometime in January.

Either way, keep it cold. We recommend refrigerating all of our syrups. Cold helps keep the sugar from crystallizing.

About the syrup

Dave's Hibiscus Lavender Syrup is four things: water, cane sugar, steeped hibiscus flowers and steeped lavender flowers. No corn syrup, no artificial flavors, no colors. That deep red is the hibiscus, not a dye. We make it in small batches at our roastery in Rhode Island, in a 16 oz bottle, which is twice the size most botanical syrups come in. At three quarters of an ounce a drink, one bottle covers a party and gets you through New Year's.

The two recipes printed on the product page, the Hibiscus Lavender Margarita and the Beach Day Gimlet, are still the ones people buy it for, and both work fine in December. Swap the lime for blood orange in the margarita and it belongs on the same table as everything above.

It also makes a good gift on its own, or tucked into one of our Rhode Island food gift sets. The rest of the line lives in Cocktail & Mocktail Syrups.

Want something warmer and darker for the same evening? Try the Cardamom Vanilla Old Fashioned, or browse all our syrup recipes.

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