The Sell Out at the Bitterroot in Ballard features The Shrubbery’s cranberry spice shrub (Image: The Shrubbery)
We know. You were mixing shrub cocktails before they were cool. But the rest of us might have something to learn from one of the newest vendors joining Broadway’s farmers market.
“This is my neighborhood market. This is my business,” Capitol Hill drinking vinegar entrepreneur Rebecca SerVoss proudly tells CHS.
Her months-old business The Shrubbery produces small bottles of the flavorful mixers designed to add a sweet and sour punch to, well, your boozy punch. And more.
“The shrub provides multiple elements of a cocktail,” SerVoss said. “It lets you add additional flavors and play with wacky vinegars.”
SerVoss launched her business after getting spun out of the corporate world. “I’ve been making shrubs for my own uses for two and a half years now. Then I lost my corporate job,” she said.
Her response was to refine her recipes and start experimenting. “I get to be a nerd about my vinegar,” she said.
In addition to the farmers market, the Capitol Hill resident has found space on the shelf at E Pine’s Sugarpill apothecary and will also have one of her shrubs again featured in a cocktail at Broadway’s Witness when the spring menu rolls back around.
Her target market includes expert craft cocktailers who know their shrubs — “boozehounds totally know what I’m doing,” she says — and cooks looking for unusual new flavors for their sauces. Shrubs are, you’re probably not surprised, a popular trend as craft cocktail pros look for new ways to create old flavors. The name, by the way, doesn’t refer to botanicals or herbs but to the Arabic word sharāb — “to drink.”
SerVoss is also enjoying introducing those new to shrubs to the flavors she has concocted and is selling by the bottle every first and third Sunday at the Broadway Farmers Market.
The Shrubbery will be in place this Sunday, March 1st. Along with some of her standard flavorings, SerVoss says to make sure to try the early rhubarb and pear and honey shrubs. The latter goes perfectly with gin, SerVoss said she’ll tell the newbies who stop by this weekend.
“People who need education — they’re a whole other level of fun for me.”
You can learn more about The Shrubbery here.
A Capitol Hill space that has run the food and drink gamut starting with a quickly shuttered investor-backed barstaurant start-up will take on new life soon with a project that has been seeking a home since early last year.
