The Kick of Bitters
A shortage of the standard brand provides an opportunity to try a dash of something new in classic cocktails. By Elin McCoy Bloomberg Markets, April 2010
“Bitters are as essential to cocktails as salt is to food,” Stephan Berg says as he pulls a travel pack of five tiny bottles of different flavors from his briefcase. Berg, 38, is co-owner of The Bitter Truth GmbH, a company based outside Munich that uses top-quality herbs, barks and spices in its concoctions, many of them adaptations of bygone-era recipes. Bitters “point up flavors, add a layer of complexity and give a cocktail an aromatic kick,” says Berg, a barman who has amassed a collection of historic examples.
Berg and his business partner, Alexander Hauck, started selling their first two bitters in 2006 in Germany and quickly gained an underground reputation among the world’s mixologists. As I put drops of each Bitter Truth flavor on my palm to sniff and lick, Berg reminds me that bitters have a long history, first as medicinal elixirs and then as an ingredient in 19th-century drinks. Hundreds of brands disappeared after 1905, but the rediscovery of dozens of classic cocktails that call for “a dash of bitters” has spawned a resurgence in artisanal bottlings and the invention of new varieties.
The Bitter Truth’s January launch in the U.S. couldn’t have been better timed. A global shortage of gentian-based bitters produced by Angostura Ltd. that started last fall had put the cocktail world into panic mode. For decades, this brand -- made in Trinidad from a secret recipe created in 1824 -- was the only one that was widely available, and U.S. drinkers went through 750,000 4-ounce (118-milliliter) bottles annually, according to Mike Smith, senior vice president of retail sales at Mizkan Americas Inc., Angostura’s new importer. While waiting for production and distribution at Angostura to get back up to speed, savvy bartenders stockpiled cases of the bitters, hunted down alternatives or whipped up their own.
Berg is cagey about his recipes but says the hardest part of adapting pioneer bartender Jerry Thomas’s own version was figuring out what to substitute for Virginia snakeroot, a banned ingredient now known to cause liver failure.
Spirits writer Gary Regan, who released his own orange bitters five years ago, predicts we’ll see more cocktail gurus bottling their own recipes. “It’s like the rise of superstar chefs selling their signature sauces in gourmet stores,” he said in a telephone interview before he went off to mix up a Manhattan -- with a dash of bitters, of course.
Columnist Elin McCoy is based in New York. elinmccoy@gmail.com
#<535521.2245115.2.1.35.32688.811># -0- Apr/07/2010 20:21 GMT
Rate this Page