At some point in your farmers market wandering, you'll stop at a table with small bottles of something that looks like juice but is clearly something else. The colors are extraordinary — deep garnet, amber gold, dusty rose. The vendor will hand you a small cup mixed with sparkling water. You'll take a sip, and then you'll stand there looking slightly puzzled about whether you enjoyed that or want another one immediately.

That's a shrub. Also called a drinking vinegar. And it's having a serious moment.

What Are Drinking Vinegars and Shrubs?

A shrub (the beverage, not the plant) is a concentrated syrup made from fruit, sugar, and vinegar — most traditionally apple cider vinegar. The combination sounds odd until you try it. The acidity does for a drink what a squeeze of lemon does: it brightens everything, adds complexity, and makes plain sparkling water taste like something you ordered at a restaurant. Both shrubs and drinking vinegars have deep historical roots — they were a primary way of preserving fruit before refrigeration. What's old is spectacularly new again.

Why They're Everywhere in 2026

Whole Foods named "Very Vinegar" one of its top food trend predictions for 2026, and the numbers back it up: the drinking vinegar market is on a strong growth trajectory as consumers shift toward low-alcohol beverages and functional fermented foods. People are drinking less alcohol, seeking more complex non-alcoholic beverages, and gravitating toward fermented foods for their noted gut-health benefits. A good shrub checks all three boxes — interesting, tangy, complex, and alive in a way that soda isn't.

For cottage food producers, shrubs and drinking vinegars are also excellent market products: shelf-stable, highly giftable, and the kind of thing people try once and then order every single week once they discover how good it is in their evening sparkling water.

How to Find Drinking Vinegars Near You

Browse local cottage food platforms. Butter & Sage Market lists small-batch beverage producers by location. Search by product to find a shrub maker in your area without driving to every market in the region.

Farmers market vendor lists. Many markets post their lineup online. Search for "shrub," "drinking vinegar," "fermented beverages," or "drinking syrups."

Instagram local food communities. Shrub makers tend to have beautifully photogenic products. Search your city name plus "shrub" or "drinking vinegar" and you'll often find local makers selling direct from their kitchen.

What to Do With a Shrub

The simplest use: one to two tablespoons of shrub concentrate in a glass of sparkling water. That's a genuinely good drink that takes ten seconds to make. Once you've got a bottle in your refrigerator, you'll find uses everywhere: in salad dressing in place of wine vinegar, stirred into yogurt for a fruit-forward parfait, as the acid in a summer marinade, mixed into cocktails as a bitters substitute, drizzled over vanilla ice cream, splashed into iced tea.

The flavor combinations cottage makers are working with right now range from the classic (strawberry balsamic, raspberry rose) to the genuinely unexpected (cucumber jalapeño, cherry cardamom, blackberry sage, peach ginger). Every bottle is a different adventure.

Why Local Made Is the Better Option

Commercial shrubs exist, but the ones worth finding are small-batch, made with real fruit, and balanced by a maker who's tasted every batch. Local producers experiment with what's in season at the market — a peach shrub made with fruit from the stand two rows over is something no grocery aisle can replicate. And their label story is always better.

Find local drinking vinegar and shrub makers near you on Butter & Sage Market — search by product to discover cottage food producers in your area.