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It is said that flavoured syrups are the coffee bean’s best friend. Good syrup adds wonderful texture and depth to your drink so this is hard to deny. With such an incredible range of available flavours out there, you can be as creative as you like.  But it’s not just coffee, they can be added to tea too. A couple of dashes of fruity syrups, some brewed tea and a slug of ice and you have yourself a Tropical Breeze iced tea.

And why stop there? Flavoured syrups can be used in some many ways.

In Italy, pavement cafes keep carbonated soda water behind their polished bars. Customers like to sit and watch the world go by without resorting to endless alcoholic sustenance. Instead the barista creates delicious light mocktails adding one or two syrups to the soda. Some more adventurous ones add a splash of lime syrup to light beers and in some countries it has been know for bars to serve beer with strawberry syrup!

For children, flavoured syrups are excellent slush or granite bases. On a scorching summer’s day there is nothing better. So keeping some in the cupboard ensures you can knock one up in no time. Grab your ice cubes from the freezer, wrap them in a clean drying-up cloth and crush with bottom of a sturdy mug or glass (or, if the mood takes you, a small hammer). Put the crushed ice in a tall cup and pour your chosen syrup(s) over. In goes a straw and outside they go.

If you are a bit of a purist when it comes to tea and coffee, then consider making a frappe°.  What’s a frappe°? Well it depends where you are in the world. It could be a frozen coffee drink, a fruit drink with shaved ice, or an ice cold milkshake. In the UK, it tends to be the latter. It always involves being cold, usually with ice and is always refreshing, especially when the sun is out.

Of course, flavoured syrups don’t just work with drinks. They make wonderful, dessert sauces. Chocolate or caramel syrups are fabulous when poured over cold ice cream sundaes or drizzled over pancakes and waffles.  Even a plate of fruit can benefit from a few drops of sweet syrup. Syrups can also be used to intensify the flavour of cake, muffin and pudding recipes. 

It would be a mistake to think only sweet syrups have a place in the kitchen. Spicy syrups like ginger provide piquant marinades for salads, cold meats and fish.

So, you don’t need to be a culinary expert to incorporate syrups into your drinking and eating habits. Instead let your imagination run riot (or, if you are feeling a little nervous, download some recipes from the Internet). The possibilities are endless and with such fantastic flavours to choose from you can’t go wrong.

If you had suggested to someone a few years ago that they should add syrup to their coffee they would have looked at you blankly and wondered what on earth you were talking about. The closest people came to syrup was probably a tin of golden or even black treacle in the kitchen cupboard!

Syrup in coffee was something a few people on the Continent indulged in when they had the time to sit outside their favourite café or bar, putting the world to rights with their companions and asking the barista to “just add a shot of vanilla”, or perhaps amaretto, to their espresso to give it a bit of a twist.

But not any more. Because if you haven’t heard of coffee syrups then you really are in the minority, and missing out.

Even here in the UK, where we can be a bit slow to embrace new culinary ideas from abroad, the idea of adding syrup to coffee is becoming more and more popular.

Coffee shops – both chains and independents – are taking advantage of this new popularity and stocking a wide range of flavours. They have realised that people want to add a dash of something new to their espresso, they want to liven up their latte, makeover their macchiato, and ring the changes with their cappuccino.

For coffee shops, it makes commercial sense. Each bottle of syrup contains a number of shots, the cost of which can be passed on to the customer with a small mark-up. A slight increase in price for the customer, but a big profit for the coffee shop.

For coffee lovers, syrups really ring the changes and add a new interest and more choice for both the coffee aficionado and the occasional coffee drinker alike. And they make only a small difference in price to your usual drink.

So, where did the practice of adding syrup to coffee come from? It is thought to have started as a syrup flavoured with actual coffee, and originated from New England. It was created in the 1930s, when drug stores started mixing leftover coffee grounds with sugar and milk, and marketing the drink at children, whose parents were in the store having ‘proper’ coffee. Bit different to a cola with a straw!

Some coffee shops in the States also started making simple sugar syrups, by dissolving sugar in water, then using the syrup as a coffee sweetener.

At some point, someone thought of bottling this syrup and it was marketed.

But all this was a far cry from the syrups we enjoy nowadays, with their very wide range of flavours – vanilla, cinnamon, amaretto, ginger, and caramel to name but a few.

You can add them to coffee in your local coffee shop, you can enjoy them at home, and they are so versatile you can even use them in cooking.