Mix Up Your Own Kicked-Up Cocktail with Anna's Kitchen Shrubs

Anna’s Kitchen Shrubs puts a Colonial-era elixir back on the menu

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A serendipitous stop at Friendly Fruit in New Bedford, where Anna Scott procured a huge bag of pre-peeled ginger for $1, ended up launching Anna’s Kitchen Shrubs. “Who wouldn’t buy pre-peeled ginger? For a dollar?” Scott asks, adding, “but then I had to figure out what to do with it.”

After making ginger ale and ginger beer (“I nearly blew up my kitchen,” she says, not realizing the fermentation process could cause bottle bombs), Scott decided to make her first shrub. Before refrigeration, fruit was preserved in barrels of vinegar. The vinegar with its fruity essence – the shrub – made a refreshing addition to spirits. Shrubs lost their appeal with the advent of refrigeration but are enjoying a resurgence from the craft cocktail movement.

Scott was introduced to shrubs at her favorite restaurant in her native St. Augustine, Florida, where there was a shrub mimosa on the cocktail list. At first, the combination of champagne, vinegar, and blueberries made it a no-go. “But I was feeling kind of spunky, so I tried it and loved it,” she says. “Then over the next year, shrubs just kept popping up.”

When Scott and her family arrived in Barrington soon after, the former corporate exec turned stay-at-home mom spent her days exploring her new ‘hood. That’s how she ended up at Friendly Fruit. That fateful bag of ginger led to her first flavor: Apple Cider Ginger. It was a big hit.

“Then I kind of went down the shrub rabbit hole.” It was her husband who encouraged her to come up with additional flavors. So she dug out her well-worn copy of The Flavor Bible and got to work concocting four additional flavors: Cranberry Mint, Banana Turmeric, Strawberry Lemon Thyme, and Peach Jalapeño.

At first hindered by the lack of cottage laws in Rhode Island, which allow small-scale makers to use their home kitchens for commercial food projects, it was kismet that food incubator Hope & Main was one mile down the road. Scott went through their incubator program and used their commercial kitchen to make one batch of each of her shrub flavors. That yielded ten cases of each flavor. She simply wanted to break even: Pay for the incubator program, the ingredients, and the bottles.

“I needed something to sell so I planned to sit on the cases and see how it was received. And a local distributor bought it all, pretty much immediately.”

Now Anna’s Kitchen Shrubs can be found statewide, at restaurants like Milk Money, Celestial Café, and Mill’s Tavern, and on the grocery shelf at Dave’s Marketplace. Plant City recently added them to their mocktail menu, and Scott just secured her first national account: Her Cranberry Mint shrub will be featured in Delta’s Sky Club Lounges. While she admits that the novelty of shrubs makes it a bit of a hard sell, she points out that “nobody heard of Kombucha” at first, either.

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