bitters , also known as “cocktail” or “aromatic” bitters, are liquid essences generally produced by macerating various herbs, spices, and other botanicals in a base spirit. The result is a liquid with a fairly concentrated flavor that is most commonly measured into drinks by dashes. They are referred to as “bitters” because they almost always include as a core ingredient something that lends a bitter flavor, traditionally ingredients such as gentian, cinchona bark, or wormwood. The cocktail (as a category of mixed drinks) was the first recreational beverage to specifically require the use of bitters. This requirement held, until the onset of American Prohibition. See cocktail.
The original cocktail bitters were an offshoot of digestive bitters, often with little other than their intended use distinguishing one from another. (Cocktail bitters predate the cocktail itself and thus were often simply referred to as “bitters.”) Stoughton’s Stomachic Bitters were the foundational example of digestive bitters and of their crossover capacity; the brand was established on apothecary shelves around 1690 and was almost immediately used mixed with spirits. See Cock-Tail.
Digestive bitters (which include the amari category) are a potable spirituous beverage that includes a variety of botanical ingredients and were believed to have medicinal or tonic value; non-potable bitters, the type now used in cocktails, were often touted specifically for an advertised medicinal purpose and promoted as a medicine instead of as a beverage. See amaro. Bitters were also known as “patent medicines,” since they would often receive (or claim to have received) “letters patent” from a royal personage that assumedly gave them authorization for producing their products as well as making claims regarding their medicinal merits.
Patent Medicines
During the 1600s and 1700s, bitters, or patent medicines, were compounded utilizing the best medical knowledge of the day in an attempt to treat or prevent various physical ailments. The compulsion to push the medicinal value of a product to include additional ailments was great, and gradually the list of cures a particular bitters promised would grow until some patent medicines would even claim to cure all diseases. In addition to various herbs and botanicals, many of these formulas would include opium, cocaine, and cannabis. Patent medicines also often used high-proof grain alcohol as a base, providing the illusion of further benefit via a high-octane kick.
Stoughton’s are widely considered the product that defined the category and indeed became so popular, and their ownership so loosely managed, that by the mid-1700s many knock-off elixirs were being sold in competition; by the end of the century, they were a standard apothecary’s formula, compounded at every pharmacy in Britain and North America. Stoughton’s Bitters lasted in common use through most of the 1800s until they were buried by the competition from proprietary brands.
The medicinal use of non-potable bitters greatly benefited from the efforts of the temperance movement, which, starting around 1820, aimed to curb or abolish the recreational use of alcohol. Bitters conveniently skirted this issue, since they were considered medicinal, not recreational.
It is perhaps due to the purported medicinal properties of non-potable bitters that they were first added to a drink and christened as a “cocktail.” Cocktails were originally considered a morning beverage, and so downing a medicinal drought upon rising in the morning could be seen as a good way to start the day. Because these types of bitters weren’t intended to be palatable straight and instead required mixing with other ingredients, diluting the medicine with a little whisky, water, and sugar made perfect sense for many. See
Behind the Bar
During the 1800s, many of the bitters which had previously been utilized as patent medicines found new life behind the mahogany. Over the years, additional bitters came to market, and eventually found their way into cocktails as well. Some of these later entries would include Angostura (1824, 1853 in the United States), Boker’s (1828), Peychaud’s (1838), Hostetter’s (1853), and Abbott’s (1872). See Angostura Bitters and Peychaud’s Bitters.
Boker’s Bitters were introduced in 1828 by John G. Boker and quickly became a favorite of bartenders. In the 1862 How to Mix Drinks, Jerry Thomas referenced Boker’s Bitters for use in a number of his cocktail recipes (although a publishing or transcription error converted it to “Bogart’s). See Thomas, Jerry. Boker’s Bitters would continue to be produced up until American Prohibition, and the company finally closed in 1920.
In 1853, Dr. Jacob Hostetter from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, developed Hostetter’s Bitters together with his son David and began large-scale production. By this time, the cocktail had already caught on, but these bitters were still being specifically marketed as a health tonic. By the time of the Civil War they’d become a bestseller, marketed as “a positive protective against the fatal maladies of the Southern swamps, and the poisonous tendency of the impure rivers and bayous.” Hostetter’s Bitters appear to have survived until the 1950s, at which point they were sold simply as a tonic.
Abbott’s Bitters were introduced by the C. W. Abbott’s company in, or slightly before, 1872. Coming to the party a little late, they had some catching up to do. Angostura by this time had already become fairly popular, and Abbott’s attempted to capture some of that market by referring to themselves as “Abbott’s—the original Angostura Bitters.” Their rationale was that they actually included angostura bark in their recipe, while Angostura bitters took their name from their town of origin, without utilizing any angostura bark whatsoever in their formula. Though some claim that Abbott’s were the original bitters used for the Manhattan, no actual evidence appears to back that up, aside from some early recipes which simply indicate its use.
Prior to Prohibition
In 1935, Albert Crocket Stevens wrote The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book, which provides insights into the drinking culture and the cocktails in use at the bar of New York’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel until it closed with the onset of Prohibition. See Waldorf-Astoria. Of note is a passage regarding gin-based cocktails and their use of bitters:
Bitters of one kind or another was considered a necessary ingredient of most Gin cocktails. The favorite was Orange Bitters, which appears in something like one hundred different recipes. A distant second was Angostura. Then there were Calisaya, Boonekamp, Boker’s, Amer Picon, Hostetter’s, Pepsin, Peychaud, Fernet Branca, and so on.
This provides some insight into the lengthy list of cocktail bitters still in common use through the early 1900s.
Prior to Prohibition, there were two major categories of bitters: aromatic and orange. While orange bitters—originally a Dutch creation and introduced to America in the 1860s—were often produced by a variety of companies (for example, Holland House Orange Bitters), aromatic bitters were usually branded and identified by name, as seen in Angostura, Peychaud’s, and Abbott’s. Other styles of bitters occasionally crop up, such as peach and celery, as well as various branded bitters such as Khoosh, Boker’s, and Stoughton. At Prohibition’s end, however, the bitters industry as a whole was much smaller, with only a handful surviving.
Twentieth Century
Passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 posed the first challenge to cocktail bitters (or patent medicines, as most were still considered to be). The law required products containing an array of potentially dangerous ingredients (including morphine, opium, cannabis, and alcohol) to clearly list these ingredients on the label and curbed some of overtly misleading or fraudulent claims on labels and for marketing.
The next setback would be American Prohibition, which began in 1920. While non-potable bitters skirted the law because of their purported medicinal use, demand for the bitters was understandably reduced. See
By the latter half of the 1900s, only Angostura bitters could commonly be found behind most bars, and even then it was rarely used. Peychaud’s Bitters could be found in bars in and around New Orleans in order to make the Sazerac cocktail, but few bars outside the region had much call for Sazeracs or Peychaud’s. By the 1980s, the non-potable bitters that had once been a defining ingredient of the cocktail had all but disappeared.
The Cocktail Resurgence
During the cocktail resurgence that started in the late 1990s, bartenders and cocktail enthusiasts rediscovered classic pre-Prohibition cocktails. They learned that many of those recipes called for styles and brands of bitters aside from Angostura and Peychaud’s. Among these cocktails was the Dry Martini, which in its earliest incarnations called for the use of orange bitters as a necessary ingredient. Many thought that orange bitters were out of production, only to discover that Fee Brothers in Rochester, New York, had been producing orange bitters since Prohibition. With orange bitters now available for their Martinis, cocktail enthusiasts began looking for other classic bitters, as well as ways to best use them in classic and modern cocktails.
This led to uncovering recipes from the 1800s for making bitters, and after figuring out some of the odd ingredients these recipes called for, many bartenders and cocktail enthusiasts tried making their own. Gradually, this home-brew batch of bitters led to some of the more adventurous to coming out with their own commercial line of bitters. Some such brands include Regans’ Orange Bitters no. 6, Scrappy’s, the Bitter Truth (aka Berg & Hauk’s in the United States), Dr. Adam Elmegirab’s, and many others. Where once cocktail enthusiasts bemoaned the difficulties in finding any bitters at all, there now exists a cottage industry with dozens of different bitters available, and the difficulty is trying to decide which bitters would work best in a particular cocktail.
Crockett, Albert Stevens. The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book. New York: New York Lithographic Corporation, 1935.
Dr. Adam Elmegirab’s. https://www.doctoradams.co.uk/ (accessed February 3, 2021).
Thomas, Jerry. How to Mix Drinks. New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1862.
Wondrich, David. Imbibe!, rev. ed. New York: Penguin, 2015.
By: Robert Hess