Search "rosemary latte" and you get about ten recipes, and every one of them starts the same way: first, make a rosemary simple syrup. Steep the herb, cool it, strain it, refrigerate it, use it inside two weeks. It's a good syrup. It's also a twenty-minute detour standing between you and a drink you wanted at seven in the morning.

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

One thing to know before the recipe: our syrup isn't only rosemary. It's rosemary and juniper berries, steeped whole. Juniper is the flavor in a gin bottle, and if that sounds like it has no business in a latte, that's a fair instinct. What it actually does is put a resinous, piney edge underneath the rosemary — green rather than bright, but doing the same job a strip of lemon peel does next to an espresso. If you've had a rosemary latte made with plain rosemary syrup and found it drifted somewhere near soap, that's the gap the juniper fills.

Why rosemary works in coffee

Rosemary is bitter before it's sweet, and that's the whole reason this drink holds together. Most flavored lattes are built to cover coffee's bitterness — vanilla, caramel and hazelnut all soften it and sweeten it out of the way. Rosemary doesn't soften anything. It sits alongside the bitterness and gives it somewhere to go, the way a bay leaf works in a braise. What you end up with tastes less like a dessert and more like a drink.

It also means you need less syrup than you're used to. Three quarters of an ounce is plenty. Pour a rosemary latte like a vanilla latte and it will taste like a hedge.

What you'll need

• 2 shots of espresso, about 2 oz — or 4 oz of strong drip or moka pot coffee
• ¾ oz Dave's Rosemary Juniper Berry Syrup
• 6 oz milk, steamed — whole milk or oat both work, oat is a little sweeter
• A sprig of fresh rosemary, optional and worth it

How to make it, hot

1. Pull two shots straight into a 10–12 oz mug.
2. Stir the syrup into the espresso while it's still hot, before any milk goes in. Syrup dropped into a finished latte sinks and stays at the bottom, and the last sip tastes like the whole drink should have.
3. Steam the milk to about 140°F — warm, not scalded. Rosemary turns harsh over heat, and so does milk.
4. Pour, and if you have rosemary in the garden, slap a sprig once against your palm before you lay it on top. That's what releases the oil. Laying it on cold does almost nothing.

The iced version

Better than the hot one, honestly, and it's the version people order in shops.

Pull the espresso, stir the syrup into it hot, then pour that over a full glass of ice and top with cold milk. Same hot-stir rule — it matters more here, not less. If you're working from cold brew instead of espresso, warm an ounce of it in the microwave for ten seconds, dissolve the syrup in that, then pour it back into the glass. Ugly, works perfectly.

How much syrup

In our cafés a 20 oz drink gets 1½ oz of syrup. That's the ratio worth scaling from, and it lands at about ¾ oz for the 10 oz mug above.

From there, ½ oz if you take your coffee black and only want the herb in the background, or a full ounce if you're used to café lattes, which are sweeter than most people think. Past that the rosemary stops being a flavor and starts being an opinion.

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 three sprigs of fresh rosemary. Push them under.
3. Steep 20 to 30 minutes. Longer isn't better; rosemary gets medicinal if you leave it in.
4. Strain, bottle, refrigerate. Use it within about two weeks.

Two honest differences with ours. The first is juniper — you can add a teaspoon of lightly crushed juniper berries at step two and get close, if you can find them. 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.

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

About the syrup

Dave's Rosemary Juniper Berry Syrup is four things: water, cane sugar, steeped rosemary and steeped juniper berries. No corn syrup, no artificial flavors, no colors. We make it in small batches at our roastery in Rhode Island, in a 16 oz bottle — twice the 8 oz most botanical syrups come in.

The latte is the newest thing it does. The one people buy it for is a gin and tonic — an ounce of gin, tonic over ice, a splash of syrup, fresh rosemary. It's just as good with no gin at all: a customer in Delaware told us it was "so yummy in a cranberry mocktail," which is a better product description than anything we've written. And the simplest version, the one that shows the flavor most clearly, is a splash in sparkling water.

If that's more your direction than the coffee, the rest of the line lives in Cocktail & Mocktail Syrups.

Want something warmer and sweeter? Try the Cardamom Vanilla Chai Latte, or browse all our syrup recipes.