Mr. Fitzpatrick's Superior Black Currant Cordial

Well this was an interesting find. Perusing a gourmet food store on my recent trip to the Orkney's I stumbled on a range of different cordial flavors from Mr. Fitzpatrick's. The brand has been producing botanicals beverage products for over a century. While there were a lot of options I selected this black currant bottle. As mentioned in a previous post, black currant flavoring is very popular in the UK.

Now, based on the bottling and my limited knowledge of cordials I thought they were alcoholic beverages like an aperitif. Cordial apparently has a slightly different meaning in the UK. The shop staff told me they weren't alcoholic, but I later learned cordials require a mixer. They are essentially just a concentrated syrup. Although I've never reviewed a cordial before on this blog, I already had the beverage and it's still a soda as an end product so why not? 

I eventually located a bottle of sparkling water and chilled both the sparkling water and the cordial in the fridge. The syrup was quite thick so I ended up mixing about three parts sparkling water to one part syrup. The flavor was not heavy, but you could always just adjust the amount of water used to make it stronger I suppose. I think this ratio worked pretty well and is refreshing with a nice currant flavoring but the taste dies off pretty quickly. This means there is no real aftertaste lingers, but some folks that like this flavor my find it disappointing to have such a short lived taste. All around I find it made a nice sipping beverage.