Angostura Bitters has been the dominant aromatic or cocktail bitters worldwide for well over a century and a half, having replaced the earlier Stoughton’s and Boker’s Bitters. See Stoughton’s Bitters. Its iconic bottles, with their oversized white paper labels, are omnipresent in bars around the globe. In its native Trinidad, a bottle of the intensely bitter, reddish-brown tincture graces every table, for cooking and as a condiment. Although most recipes call for a few dashes, Angostura also sells its namesake in five-gallon pails and 55-gallon drums.
In its initial decades only a few hundred cases sold annually. But after Johann’s first son, Carlos Dámaso Siegert (1830–1905), took over marketing, it won an Honourable Mention in the Great London Exhibition of 1862, which gained it British distribution in 1863, with American distribution following right after. Numerous international exhibition awards followed.
While the bitters continued to be marketed as a stomachic, it quickly found off-label use as a drink enhancer in things such as Pink Gin and cocktails. See cocktail. Angostura’s success forced Siegert and his heirs to vigorously defend their trademark for many decades against infringers such as Abbott’s Angostura bitters, founded in Baltimore in 1872. To this day, the bitters’ recipe is a tightly held secret, known only to a handful of Angostura executives.
Soon after bringing Carlos into the business in 1867, the elder Siegert died. Facing political upheaval in Venezuela, Carlos and his younger brother Alfredo escaped to Trinidad in 1875, moving Angostura’s operations with them. By 1878, Siegert’s Bouquet, a bottling of the same Trinidad rum used in the bitters, was part of the company’s portfolio.
The bitters’ trademark oversize label originated as a mistake—the brothers had independently designed both a new bottle and a label without consulting each other on the dimensions. They lost a subsequent competition, but a judge noted that the oversized label was good for brand identity—it has remained that way since. Mark Twain was an early admirer, requesting of his wife that she have them present in his bathroom, along with scotch whisky, lemon, and sugar, upon his 1874 return to the United States.
Circa 1878, Angostura’s Venezuelan agent, George Diogracia Wuppermann (1838–1915), and his American wife moved to New Jersey (and later Manhattan) to manufacture and distribute the bitters in North America; under his stewardship, the brand went from being a cocktail bitters to being the cocktail bitters. Wuppermann’s son Frank became a vice president in the highly successful family firm in 1934, and five years later, under his stage name, Frank Morgan, played the title role in the MGM film, The Wizard of Oz. The Angostura-Wuppermann company left family hands in the 1970s, while in Trinidad the last Siegert retired in 1990. Today the brand is owned by a Trinidad-based holding company, CL Financial.
Angostura’s early portfolio included Carypton, a bottled Green Swizzle base of rum, lime juice, sugar, and “indigenous herbs of the West Indies.” That was trademarked in 1907. See Green Swizzle. In 1947, the company’s ever-growing need for rum, for both bitters and their rum brands, led them to build their own distillery; today the company markets a wide range of rums, some of them highly regarded.
Despite its 44.7 percent ABV strength, Angostura bitters is not classified as a potable alcoholic beverage in the United States. Seeing opportunity as Prohibition encroached in 1920, a Washington, Wisconsin, bar owner obtained a pharmacist’s license to dispense Angostura shots to his “patients,” a tradition still continued at Nelsen’s Hall Bitters Pub.
A few dashes of Angostura bitters are de rigueur in numerous classic cocktails, including the Manhattan and the Old-Fashioned. A float of Angostura bitters crowns the iconic Queen’s Park Swizzle, concocted at the Trinidad hotel of the same name. Angostura bitters is a staple in many of the tiki drink recipes that emerged in post–World War II America, including the Zombie and Three Dots and a Dash, both created by Donn Beach. See Zombie; Beach, Donn.
The early twenty-first-century craft cocktail movement found Angostura bitters pushed to the forefront of cocktail ingredients. Italian bartender Valentino Bolognese won Angostura’s 2008 European competition with his Trinidad Especial, containing a full 30 ml of Angostura bitters (most cocktails use less than a tenth of that), along with pisco, orgeat, and lime juice, with the bitters’ high alcohol content acting as a base spirit.
Thirty ml or more of Angostura can overwhelm a recipe unless it is balanced with copious amounts of sweet ingredients such as orgeat or cream of coconut. Modern tiki recipes like Zac Overman’s Angostura Colada further popularized the bitters’ upfront flavors. Toward that end, in 2015 Angostura introduced Amaro di Angostura, a less-concentrated, liqueur-based variation designed for cocktail use.
See also bitters.
De Verteuil, Anthony. The Germans in Trinidad. Port of Spain, Trinidad: Litho, 1994.
“Dr. Siegert’s Angostura Bitters” (advertisement). San Francisco Bulletin, December 16, 1863, 2.
“Made a Fortune from a Formula-and She Never Knew What It Was.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 11, 1936, 87.
Siegert, R. W. “The Company and You” (presentation). Angostura archives, June 1966.
“Venezuelan Bitters” (advertisement). London Sporting Gazette, July 11, 1863, 16.
Willis, Resa. “Mark and Livy: The Love Story of Mark Twain and the Woman Who Almost Tamed Him.” New York; Routledge, 2003.
By: Matt Pietrek