The cardinal rule for a simple homemade lemonade recipe: 1:1:4. One tart, one sweet, and 4 water to tone it down.

While the days of summer are ticking down, you gotta savor the moments! Hopefully you are all still spending lots of time with family enjoying the scorchingly hot weather, barbecuing, and sipping on some cool refreshing drinks.

We love our lemonade around here, and wanted to do something fun for a get-together so we thought, hey, why not try a little lemonade bar. You know, where each person can flavor and sweeten their lemonade to their own liking?

It’s fun guys. Give it a try.

Here are a few suggestions so you can have something for everyone:

Change up your base – Keep it basic with the 1 part lemon juice, 1 part sugar, and 4 parts water. Change up your sweetener by going half honey for an earthier flavor. Change up your water by doing a lightly carbonated variety. If you do this, a simple syrup is better for the sweetener so you don’t shake out all the carbonation (1/2 cup water, 1 cup sugar – boil for 5 minutes).

Herbed syrups – these are great simply with the lemonade or in addition to some fruity tones. Try our Herbed Lemonade here.

Fruit syrups – make these in advance to flavor it up. For berry flavors, you can use a little less, for peach, a little more since it’s a lighter note. Make your own, or use some from Torani. Here are some of our berry syrups to try: strawberry, raspberry, peach, blackberry.

Herbed teas – we really like this passion tea from Tazo (make it double strong and slightly sweetened). Also go for a Wildberry Zinger (from Celestial Seasonings). Click here for our Passion Tea Lemonade.

Smashed fruit add-ins – Blackberry, raspberry, strawberry, blueberry. We like to smash up a little so that it releases the flavors better, but you can also just keep the fruit whole just to get more of a pretty look. Go here for our Blackberry Lemonade.

Garnishments – keep the fruit whole, throw in some fresh cool cucumbers, or even some extra mint and basil to pretty things up!

Extra plain simple syrup on hand – we recommend to make the base a little more tart since people will be adding simple syrups to the mix, but for those who want to keep the lemonade plain but a little sweeter, this is a great option.

Host Your Own Lemonade Bar! Find recipes for syrups, mix-ins, and more ideas!

5 from 1 vote

Simple Homemade Lemonade Recipe Plus 5 Easy Variations for Having a Lemonade Bar {Fashion Fridays}

Author Tammy Blankenship and Christina Lakey

Ingredients

1 part lemon juice
1 part granulated sugar
4 parts water

Instructions

Mix together lemon juice, granulated sugar, and water.
Each person can flavor their lemonade to their own liking!

Recipe Notes

Dress it Up:
Serve basic lemonade with a variety of syrup and fruit mix-ins.
Here are some of our favorites:
Fruit - blackberry, blueberry, strawberry, raspberry (as syrups, mix-ins, or both)
Herbs - mint, basil
Herbal Tea - Passion Tea (Tazo), Wildberry Zinger (Celestial Seasonings)
Cucumber
Change it Up:
Substitute lightly carbonated water for a little fizz. If you are going to carbonate, we recommend using a plain simple syrup for the sweetener, made by boiling 1 part granulated sugar, 1/2 part water for 5 minutes.
Substitute the granulated sugar with honey (we usually just go half and half) for an earthier tone (this goes well with the fruity tea varieties!)

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I'm Christina and I love to eat! And I love to talk about food! And I love to find the best techniques to create the perfect dish. Sometimes I want fancy, sometimes I want quick, and sometimes I just want some comfort. I created the FoodApparel community to celebrate "dressing food for every occasion."