If you’ve ever worked behind a bar or made cocktails before, you’ve come across these small bottles with dasher tops and droppers that are called ‘Bitters’. They come in a wide array of flavors, shapes, colors and weird names. But what exactly are they?
Bitters is the word that we use for highly concentrated infusions and extractions of herbs, spices and other flavouring ingredients. So highly concentrated that we only have to use a few drops to enhance flavors in cocktails or drastically change the finished drink.
Historically, bitters were actually not meant for cocktails, but used as medicine. If you’ve seen our other video on maceration, you know that alcohol has the quality of absorbing flavours and qualities of whatever you introduce to it. So back in the day, people would steep their medicinal herbs in an alcoholic solution to create alcoholic elixirs that they could drink as medicine! It’s a lot easier to drink a tonic or add it into your soup, rather than eating a whole bushel of medicinal plants. They got the name ‘bitters’ because more often than not, they tasted quite bitter as herbal medicine tends to do.
People also realized that bitter agents helped with digestion after a meal, so the idea of taking medicinal bitters after a large meal was sometimes also done in combination with an after dinner drink.
This practice of adding medicinal bitters to your alcoholic beverage soon resulted in what we know today as the very first cocktail, the old-fashioned. A combination of a spirit, sugar and bitters. Many famous cocktail bitters actually started out as medicine, like peychaud’s for example.
Once people started experimenting with bitters in cocktails many varieties of bitters entered the commercial market. Nowadays, the term bitters stuck to all the different types of highly concentrated extractions that we use behind the bar. More often than not, these bitters are quite high in their alcohol, but some bitters exist that aren’t alcoholic at all. As long as its a highly concentrated liquid with the intent for cocktail flavouring, we can call them bitters. Sometimes they aren’t even bitter at all anymore!
In classic cocktail recipes the addition of bitters is measured in ‘dashes’, so a quick hand motion that shakes out the liquid through the small openings in the top of the bottle. On average, one dash is usually somewhere between 1 milliliter to 1,5 milliliters of liquid. This depends on the speed of movement, the amount of liquid still in the bottle and the quality of the lid on the bottle. Luckily, more and more producers are opting for little droppers to help bartenders be more precise in their measurements.
A lot of classic cocktail recipes include bitters and modern style bitters are extremely varied. Next time you are looking for a lot of flavour in small doses, you should consider using some bitters or play around with the classics and using new and different flavours.
