Aside from one sounding much more delicious than the other…Remember, I live and work in Southern California, the most narcissistic place on Buddha’s Green Earth, where people ask for cocktails with no sugar because they want alcohol but are too stupid to order it neat with a citrus wedge on the side…Wait…Where was I?…Oh yeah, syrup versus cordial. Is there really a difference?

Like I said, cordial just sounds better, nicer, less sweet. A bit of a bartending magic trick. Not only a noun but also an adjective meaning friendly or warm, sincere or heartwarming, invigorating or stimulating, yada yada. Yeah, already sounds sooooo much better than syrup which conjures visions of rotten teeth and trips to the dentist. You put syrup on a menu…Oh boy, hard no, but cordial, oh cordial sounds romantic, even a bit sensual. You want to slather it on your body, bathe in it…

Yes, as a bartender sometimes you have to trick people into ordering certain things. Chefs do it all the time. Insert a French, Japanese, or Italian word and whisk people away, conjure another, foreign land. Add an ingredient such as blood orange or kale to something. Mix and match.

Back on track here. So? What’s the damn deal? Are they really different? If you ask the great god Googs, our robotic overlords tell us yes, cordial (noun) is with spices, or could be liqueur, a fruit syrup, or medicine. Yeah, it appears it could be anything you want it to be and if you take it beyond Googs, anyone and anybody has their own definition of what it is.

So cordial, in essence is a malleable fluid term. I like this idea simply because it is chaotic but also I think sometimes we need to be less strict about certain things. You know, like bourbon only being from Kentucky, and so on and so forth. I like when certain words have so many definitions it confuses people and waiters. In the bar world we have plenty. Whiskey. Whisky. Rum. Rhum. Cognac.

Personally I don’t use the term cordial at all because I think it’s annoying, pretentious sounding, and not specific. Does it have booze and sugar in it? Ok, not a syrup but a liqueur. Spices with sugar and such? Ok, still a syrup. Pretty easy to figure out. Now once we climb into the territory of adding citric acid and other powders maybe, just maybe we can start to talk about cordials, eh?

Why would you want to add citric acid, malic acid to a liqueur or syrup? Well, to add an element of sourness with out having to add any lemon or lime juice. Adding juices will create dilution and maybe you don’t want that? I don’t know.

In conclusion: Behind the bar, let’s just say a cordial is a complex thing with acid added to it. A syrup is sugar and fruit or water, whatever, sugar and liquids or fruit together. And yes, it’s the bartender version of you versus the guy she told you not to worry about.

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