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HOW MANY DO WE have? We have all three!” I was having a quiet drink in a bar recently and an eager young off-duty mixologist was interrogating Gavin, the older gentleman behind the bar, as to how many different bottles of cocktail bitters the bar stocked.

Gavin’s pointed response refers to the sacred trinity of cocktail bitters: Angostura aromatic bitters, Peychaud’s bitters, and orange bitters. Many will say you need no more in a bar, though, in a lot of countries, it’s still difficult to find all three. But in most places,

mixologists nowadays stock their bars with dozens of brands, with flavours ranging from lavender-chipotle to gentian, chocolate-mole and hellfire (which is, it seems, a flavour).

Having a wide array of exotic cocktail bitters has become one of the perceived hallmarks of a good bar, like a disdain for vodka or a liking for sleeve gaiters. Barware suppliers such as Cocktail Kingdom sell dainty Japanese-style decanters you can pour your bitters into.

A typical 4oz bottle of non-potable cocktail bitters retails for around $10, which would equate to $63 if it was in a 75cl bottle. Bitters are relatively inexpensive to make. Given that a well-made amaro designed to be drunk straight typically retails for $30 or less (and a fine 12-year-old single malt for $50), there are clearly healthy margins in those little bottles.

MEDICINAL USES

Back in the day, bitters were medicines containing botanicals designed to cure indigestion and a host of other ailments, stabilised in alcohol. In fact Angostura, the world’s biggest bitters brand, was created as a tropical medicine for army troops in 1824 by Dr Johann Siegert.

Siegert wasn’t the first, though, not by a long chalk. There were already mega-bitters brands such as Stoughton’s and Boonekamp that date back to 1700s Europe. However they began, it’s now accepted that bitters contain bittering flavours (quassia, cinchona and wormwood are popular, and hops have made a comeback),

flavouring agents (anything from citrus to celery to, ahem, hellfire) and alcohol, to stabilise and preserve the botanicals, plus perhaps some sugar and colouring.

No one is quite sure when bitters became more of a recreational cocktail ingredient than an essential medicine, but one clue is that the oldest comprehensive definition of the word

‘cocktail’, dating from 1806 in New York, is as “a stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters”.

The fortunes of bitters are thus largely linked to the popularity of cocktails, and bitters were vital in the first Golden Age of cocktails, which ran in the US from the mid-1800s almost until Prohibition came into force in 1920.

American bartenders promptly emigrated to places such as Europe and Cuba so they could continue to ply their trade, spreading the gospel of the cocktail far and wide – and always with a bottle or two of bitters to hand.

Back in the US, though, Prohibition almost wiped out the use of bitters in cocktails, although ironically bitters remained available during those dark days as it was ‘medicine’.

The best bartenders had left and, as Prohibition dragged on for 14 dreary years, even the mediocre ones retired. The art of elegantly improving a well-made spirit with a dash or two of bitters, a small amount of sugar and some ice almost became extinct – raw spirit was drowned in juice, sugar or soda.

Post-Prohibition, classic cocktails began to be made without bitters, and then the tiki-drinks craze, followed by the disco-drinks era, taught generations of drinkers that it seems you don’t really need bitters at all.

DEPTH, SPICE AND FLAVOUR

Do bitters really make a difference in cocktails? Yes they do – they add depth, spice and flavour, and a cocktail isn’t quite right without them. Bitters don’t necessarily make a cocktail taste bitter any more than salt makes food taste salty – both simply add flavour when used in the right quantities.

Bitters shine best and brightest in minimalist classics – Martinis, Manhattans, Sazeracs, and the like. You probably don’t need bitters in a Piña Colada or a Long Island Iced Tea – their flavours tend to get lost when used in drinks that are too large or too sweet, although New York bartender Giuseppe Gonzalez got around this with his Trinidad Sour cocktail by using a whopping 3cl of Angostura bitters in it.

Things did not begin to improve bitters-wise until the mid-to-late 1990s, when Dick Bradsell (in London) and Dale de Groff (in New York) began to champion true classic cocktails – strong, small, very cold, made with decent spirits, and bitters.

The bars they ran – notably Dick’s Bar in the Atlantic Bar & Grill in London and The Rainbow Room in New York – gained worldwide press, and the race was on to recreate all the recipes in all the old cocktail books that began to be hunted down in secondhand bookstores. And that meant recreating bitters.

Everyone had Angostura Aromatic, of course, or it could easily be found. Peychaud’s was findable too, at least if you lived in the US and knew someone in New Orleans, its greatest market due to its use in the Sazerac, the official cocktail of the Big Easy.

But where did one get orange bitters? Or Stoughton’s? Or Abbott’s? Bartenders around the world began making their own bitters, out of necessity and curiosity and because the hivemind of drinkboy.com and a nascent internet delivered recipes for doing so. The results were sometimes great, sometimes awful and often just…OK. Turns out, bitters require more skill to make consistently than anyone had thought.

Bar guru Gaz Regan made an orange bitters in his kitchen that he gave away to friends such as De Groff and, after having trouble getting the flavours consistent, Regan approached the Sazerac company, owner of Peychaud’s. Was it interested in developing his orange bitters commercially and marketing them? Yes. Yes it was.

Regan’s No. 6 Orange Bitters is now a staple at most bars, and bartenders sometimes apparently combine Regan’s with the orange bitters from Fee Brothers to make a hybrid orange bitters nicknamed Feegans. Another modern success story comes from Germany. Munich bartenders Stephan Berg and Alexander Hauck started The Bitter Truth company in 2006, to make commercial versions of the bitters they had been making at home. It seems every cocktail bar worth its salt stocks Bitter Truth bitters, and the company recently revived the Boker’s/Bogart’s bitters, reputedly the bitters specified in the oldest known printed recipe for a Martini.

FOOD INGREDIENT

The behemoth of the category, Angostura, doesn’t rest on its laurels, it’s seen cocktail booms come and go. The brand always promoted itself heavily as a food ingredient, and recently sponsored the Cochon 555 consumer foodie festival tour in the US. It’s not widely known that Angostura additionally built a significant business as a prepared-foods ingredient. Its aromatic bitters are added as flavouring agents to a wide range of supermarket prepared foods and sauces, and if you ask nicely you can buy it in five-gallon drums instead of 118ml bottles. One bar owner, Jamie Boudreau, did just that so he had enough Angostura bitters to paint the wood in his award-winning bar, Canon in Seattle. Its quite a beautiful red colour, in case you’re wondering, and it took about three gallons.

The food focus makes business sense. Because all cocktail bitters are classed as ‘non-potable’, although alcoholic they can be sold through both alcohol and grocery distribution channels. In a final example of not putting all your eggs in one basket, Angostura now sells a canned premix of LLB, the ultra-low-alcohol lemonade, lime and bitters drink popular in Australia.

Bitter Truth and Bittermens have expanded into producing liquors, liqueurs, syrups and cocktail mixes ranging from pimento dram to aquavit to bitter lemon. Indeed, interest in bitters is so high that Sazerac acquired a strategic interest in Bittermens last year.

We are deep in the second Golden Age of cocktails, and it seems even Gavin may have to get a few more bottles of bitters in.