Lime sparkling water, three ways
The unsweetened infusion, the syrup, and the ratio that makes the finished drink.
In season: Year-round from Mexico and Florida. Persian limes are the standard supermarket fruit. Key limes are smaller, seedier and far more aromatic, and they earn the extra work in syrup.
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Infused, unsweetened — and why it fails
Use
Skip it. Lime is the one citrus that does not cold-infuse, and no ratio fixes that.
Method
Lime peel gives up bitterness faster than anything else in this section. Sliced lime in cold still water tastes green and pleasant for about 90 minutes and soapy by hour three, and the soapiness stays after you pull the fruit. If you want lime water, cut and squeeze at the moment of serving: juice of 1 lime per 500ml, no steep at all.
Time
There is no good steep time. 90 minutes is the outer limit and it is not worth the fridge space.
Sparkling
Because there is no steep, lime is the one flavour you can build directly in the sparkling water. Squeeze into the glass, drop the spent shell in for 30 seconds for the oil, take it out.
Keeps
Fresh lime juice holds its character about 4 hours refrigerated and tastes tired the next day. Squeeze to order.
The syrup
Ratio
1 cup sugar : 1 cup water : zest of 4 limes : 1/2 cup fresh lime juice
Method
Dissolve the sugar in the water over low heat, about 3 minutes. Off the heat, add the zest and steep 20 minutes. Strain, cool completely, then stir in the juice. Cooked lime juice tastes like candy, so it stays out of the pan.
Keeps
10 days refrigerated, shorter than most syrups here. Lime loses its top note fast even held in sugar.
Note
Zest before you juice. Every time. A juiced lime half is almost impossible to zest.
The finished soda
1 part syrup to 4 parts sparkling water over ice, with a fresh wedge squeezed in on top
Half a teaspoon of fine sea salt per cup of syrup makes a lime soda taste twice as limey. That is the trick a good paloma is running.
The shrub version
Lime shrub comes out thin because there is no flesh to macerate. Use lime as the finishing acid stirred into a pineapple or mango shrub instead, 1 tablespoon juice per cup.
What doesn't work: Lime wheels in a jug of water overnight, which is the photograph on every infused-water article, produces something genuinely unpleasant. Lime pith is thin and aggressive and it leaches within hours, and unlike lemon it drags a bitter edge out of the peel oil with it. The other failure is boiling lime juice down into syrup, which flips it from fresh lime to lime candy in about 90 seconds of simmering.
Goes with: MintCucumberGingerPineappleJalapeno