Cranberry sparkling water, three ways
The unsweetened infusion, the syrup, and the ratio that makes the finished drink.
In season: Fresh from October through December. A bag freezes for a year and cooks straight from frozen.
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Infused, unsweetened
Use
Cranberry does not cold-infuse. Raw cranberries are dense, waxy and close to dry, and a cup of them sitting in cold water overnight gives you water with a faint tannic edge and no cranberry in it.
Method
For unsweetened cranberry water, simmer 1 cup cranberries in 4 cups water for 10 minutes until every berry has popped, then strain and chill. That is a decoction rather than an infusion, and it is the only way to get flavour out without sugar.
Time
No useful cold time. 10 minutes at a simmer, then 2 hours to chill through.
Sparkling
Chill the strained liquid all the way down before it meets sparkling water. Pouring bubbles into anything still warm dumps the carbonation on contact.
Keeps
4 days refrigerated. It outlasts a raw fruit infusion because it was cooked.
The syrup
Ratio
2 cups cranberries : 1.5 cups sugar : 1.5 cups water
Method
Simmer 10 minutes until every berry has popped, steep 15 minutes off the heat, strain through a sieve without pressing. The solids left in the sieve are cranberry sauce, so keep them.
Yield
About 2 cups, plus a bowl of sauce
Keeps
3 weeks refrigerated, 6 months frozen. Cranberry syrup outlasts the berry syrups because the fruit is acidic enough to look after itself.
Note
The extra half cup of sugar is doing real work here. At a straight 1:1 cranberry syrup makes a soda nobody finishes.
The finished soda
1 part syrup to 5 parts sparkling water, over ice, with a wide strip of orange peel twisted over the glass
Cranberry arrives with plenty of acid. What it wants is aromatics, so orange peel or a single clove.
The shrub version
Cranberry needs less vinegar than anything else here. Cook 2 cups cranberries with 1.5 cups sugar as for the syrup, strain, then stir only 1/2 cup cider vinegar into the finished syrup. Full-strength vinegar on top of cranberry acid is undrinkable.
What doesn't work: Cold-infusing raw cranberries. It is the standard first attempt and it returns nothing. They have to be heated until they burst before anything comes out of them.
Goes with: OrangeRosemaryGinger