Bitters

Bitters are a flavouring concentrate: a high proof spirit infused with bittering agents such as gentian root, cinchona bark and quassia, plus aromatics like clove, cassia and citrus peel, then bottled with a dasher top so it comes out a few drops at a time. Angostura, the reference bottle in almost every home bar, runs 44.7 percent ABV. Peychaud’s sits at 35 percent and Regans’ Orange bitters at 45. You never drink any of them straight, and that is a matter of formulation rather than taste. A dash measures somewhere around 0.6 to 1 millilitre, which puts roughly 160 dashes in a standard four ounce bottle.

What that dash does is season. Bitters play the role in a cocktail that salt plays in cooking, so they do not make a drink taste bitter, they pull the sweet and the sour ends together and give the whole thing a spine. An Old Fashioned without them is sweetened whiskey. The economics are pleasant too, because a bottle costing twelve to eighteen dollars survives several hundred drinks and cannot spoil, since 89 proof alcohol is its own preservative.

Bitters are not amari. Campari, Aperol, Fernet Branca and Averna are potable bitters, licensed beverage alcohol between roughly 16 and 45 percent, poured by the ounce and drunk neat or over ice. Cocktail bitters are dosed in drops and are classified in the United States as unfit for beverage use, which is a genuine regulatory distinction rather than a marketing one.

Building a bitters shelf and using it properly

Three bottles cover almost everything, and the order matters.

Angostura is first and it is not optional. Clove, cinnamon and gentian forward, it goes into the Old Fashioned, the Manhattan, the Champagne Cocktail and a hundred drinks after those. Peychaud’s is second: lighter, anise and cherry forward, unmistakably red, and the defining ingredient in a Sazerac. Orange bitters is the third bottle rather than the tenth, and it does more work across gin and whiskey drinks than any of the novelty flavours people tend to buy first. Everything after that, whether mole, celery, grapefruit or black walnut, is both genuinely useful and genuinely optional.

Price is not the barrier people expect it to be. A four ounce bottle of Angostura runs twelve to eighteen dollars, Peychaud’s eight to twelve for five ounces, and a respectable orange bitters eleven to sixteen. Craft producers such as Bittermens sit nearer twenty dollars for five ounces. A three or four bottle starter set lands somewhere between thirty five and sixty dollars, and at two dashes a drink it will outlast almost every bottle of spirit standing beside it.

Dosing deserves more care than it gets. Don Lee at Cocktail Kingdom emptied bottles dash by dash and measured 41 dashes per fluid ounce, about 0.72 millilitres each, but the output of a dasher top is not constant. It changes with how full the bottle is and how hard you flick it, and some Japanese style dashers deliver a third of what a standard bottle does. Dash once onto the back of your hand with a new bottle and calibrate.

Storage is undemanding: cool, dark, upright, cap on. At that proof nothing in the bottle can go rancid, though volatile aromatics do fade across years, so a bottle bought in 2014 and used twice will be duller than a fresh one. Kept beside the rest of the cocktail kit on the back bar, bitters are one of the few things there that never need refrigerating.

Cocktail bitters versus amaro

The difference is dosage before it is flavour.

Cocktail bitters are made deliberately unpalatable neat and get used in drops. Amari are designed to be drunk. Campari at 24 percent goes into a Negroni an ounce at a time, Fernet Branca at 39 percent is a bartender shot, and Averna and Montenegro sit in the same family. Swap them by name and the drink collapses in one direction or the other, because a few dashes of Campari does nothing measurable and an ounce of Angostura is undrinkable.

The boundary is regulatory as well as practical. In the United States, 27 CFR 19.5 separates bitters fit for beverage purposes, which are taxed as spirits, from bitters made unfit to drink as a beverage, which are treated as a non-beverage food product. That classification is why a 44.7 percent bottle of Angostura sits on a grocery shelf in states where you cannot buy wine in the same aisle, and producers submit samples for testing to establish it. Serve the potable kind in a rocks glass, and the other kind three drops at a time.

Patent medicine to the 1806 cocktail

Bitters began as medicine. Richard Stoughton, a London apothecary, patented a bitters compound on 3 April 1712, only the second medicine patent granted in England, and bitters sold as digestive tonics for a century before anyone treated them as a drinks ingredient. The pivot is documented precisely: on 13 May 1806 the Balance and Columbian Repository in Hudson, New York defined a cock-tail as “a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters”. Bitters were in the original definition of the word.

Angostura followed in 1824, created by Dr Johann Siegert, a German surgeon serving with Bolívar’s army in the Venezuelan town of Angostura, as a treatment for stomach complaints; his sons moved production to Trinidad in 1875. Antoine Amédée Peychaud, a Haitian refugee apothecary, opened his New Orleans pharmacy in 1841 and gave the Sazerac its bitters. Prohibition then nearly finished the category off, leaving Angostura and Peychaud’s as the reliable survivors until the craft revival brought The Bitter Truth in 2006 and Bittermens in 2007.

Four things people get wrong

Substituting Peychaud’s for Angostura one for one is the first, and they are not variations on a theme. Angostura is clove and cinnamon over a hard gentian bitterness, while Peychaud’s is lighter, sweeter and full of anise and cherry. A Manhattan made with Peychaud’s is a different drink, sometimes a good one, never the one you ordered.

Over dashing is second, and it usually happens with a fresh bottle. A full bottle dashes harder than a half empty one, and an enthusiastic flick can put three dashes where you wanted one. Count with your wrist rather than your intent.

Third is buying breadth before depth. A shelf holding six boutique bitters and no orange bitters is a common sight in a new bar setup, and it makes fewer drinks than three basics would.

Fourth is expecting bitters to taste bitter in the glass. At two dashes in three ounces of spirit they are seasoning rather than a flavour in their own right, and the usual sign that a drink needs them is that it tastes flat, not that it tastes sweet. If you want a genuinely bitter drink, that is amaro territory, and a speakeasy style bar is a fine excuse to stock both.