day of the dead bitters

I just got a request for the ingredients for one of my old bitters recipes that I developed back in 2010 called the Day of the Dead Bitters. The idea was a Mexican-themed bitters that were not chocolate molé-based but instead featured calendula or marigold petals. Calendula has been used throughout Dead of the Dead celebrations to decorate altars and graves as well as commemorate the deceased in homes. The bright orange, pungent flowers are believed to attract dead souls and bring them back home; however, the roots of the association probably started by the flowers utility in hide the odors of death and decay during funerals. As for other Mexican-themed ingredients, coffee, ancho chili, cinnamon, sage, cumin, and clove were also utilized. Moreover, I decided to utilize tonka bean; despite the FDA frowning on this delicious botanical, it is frequently utilized in Mexican vanilla extracts. Besides a vanilla note, it also donates a beautiful spice richness to infusions. Regular vanilla bean could be substituted if need be.

The bitters themselves found their way into a few Boston recipes including Scott Holliday's Ofrenda, Ran Duan's Jarabe Tapatío, and Ben Sandrof's Bittered Fling. Without further ado, here is my recipe:

Day of the Dead Bitters
• 20 gram Marigold (Calendula) petals, dried
• 12 gram Chamomile, dried
• 8 gram Orange peel, dried
• 2 gram Lemon peel, dried
• 6 gram Cinnamon stick, broken up
• 1 gram Corriander seed
• 1 gram Cumin seed
• 3 gram Thyme, dried
• 2 gram Oregano, dried
• 4 gram Spearmint, dried
• 1 gram Clove
• 6 gram Coffee bean, medium roast, broken up
• 2 gram Ancho chili powder
• 8 gram Tonka bean, broken up
Add 16 oz Bacardi 151 proof Rum and 8 oz water to make 24 oz of 100° spirit. Let infuse for 10 days with frequent mixing. Filter through a coffee filter, and bottle.

The bitters were only made once according to my notebook and led me to develop flower bitters that I dubbed "Bumble Bee Bitters" which also utilized marigold and chamomile (as well as lavender) but in a more herbal and classical bitters direction.

smoking ban bitters

A little over two years ago, I received a cigar as a gift from a friend who was clearing out his humidor as he improved his stock. Since it was winter and I was not going to smoke it indoors or out, I stashed it away. A few months later, I was in the midst of oak aging my Abbott's Bitters, and I decided that cigar bitters sounded rather alluring especially after reading about a recipe Tiare had done on her A Mountain of Crushed Ice blog.My goal was to make an aromatic bitters that would work great in anything Abbott's or even Angostura does but particularly dark spirits drinks like rye, Cognac, and aged rum. Since I had a lot of new botanicals from the Abbott's Bitters recipe and it would be months before that batch was ready, I took influence from it, Boker's Bitters, and a few thoughts in my head of what would pair well. Like most of my bitters recipes, I started with 6-8 tester infusions containing the base flavor (cigar tobacco) and 3-5 other ingredients in one ounce of spirit to see how they paired up. By combining the best of the taster infusion recipes and scaling up in weight (and sometimes modifying a tester's ingredients), I made my first pass. The tobacco flavors were so powerful in a beautiful murky and earthy way that I had to keep upping certain flavors so they did not get drowned out. Last summer, I repeated the recipe using all the initial and additional weights this time from the start, and the recipe worked as wonderfully as it had a year and a half before.

When I mentioned online that I had been developing these bitters, I received a stern warning about the toxicity of tobacco infusions. Therefore, I did the math (* see below) and the bitters appear to be safe as nonpotable bitters used dash-wise -- just not for use in large quantities like Angostura and Peychaud's have. If you have any concerns over the use of tobacco or nicotine, please do not make these bitters, use them, or serve them to others. In fact, do not make them at all -- I am just providing the recipe for historical record like others provide Jerry Thomas' Decanter Bitters recipe (has snakeroot which is not too good for you either). Remember: nicotine is bad, bad stuff.

For a name, I thought about how bars around here used to be smoke filled dens of iniquity. After the smoking ban went into effect, it almost felt like something was missing. The bitters were named in tribute to the olden days.

Smoking Ban Bitters
• 12.0 gram Cigar Tobacco
• 5.6 gram Wild Cherry Bark
• 1.2 gram Catechu (Betel Nut, found at Indian groceries or online)
• 1.2 gram Calamus Root
• 1.2 gram Quassia Bark
• 2.0 gram Allspice (~11 berries)
• 2.4 gram Spearmint, dry
• 6 Tahitian Vanilla Bean
• 0.9 gram Clove (10 cloves)
• 4 tsp Vanilla Extract (Bourbon)
• 1 tsp Bay Essential Oil (Pimenta Racemosa)
• 24 oz Whiskey, 100 Proof
Break up larger botanicals into small bits (crack allspice berries, chop up vanilla beans and catechu, etc.). Infuse for 7-10 days. Strain through a coarse strainer, and filter through coffee filters or similar. Bottle. Flavor seems shelf stable for well over a year.

(*) Nicotine Content of Bitters
• Infusion: 12 grams of cigar tobacco, 24 oz spirit (100 proof)
• Cigar Tobacco: <1.5% nicotine by dry weight, generally lower 1
• <7.5 mg nicotine per oz bitters (assuming a theoretical 100% extraction, that the cigar was 100% dry, and highest nicotine content of the range in cigar tobacco)
• 0.5-1.0 mg nicotine/kg body weight can be a lethal dosage for non-smoking adult humans [2, 3]
• 150 lb (68.2 kg) adult = 34.1-68.2 mg nicotine
• At the highest theoretical amount of nicotine extraction using this recipe (7.5 mg nicotine/oz) and the lowest toxicity (34.1 mg), a person of 150 pounds or more would need to drink over 3 shots (4.55 oz).
• Therefore, this recipe should be used dash-wise only and kept away from any human that should not be drinking alcohol or ingesting nicotine in the first place (like children, elderly, pregnant). And no use of these nonpotable bitters as potable ones should ever be attempted regardless of what has been with Angostura or Peychaud's.
• Repeat: Do not use tobacco infusions as you would normal potable spirits like whiskey, vodka, or gin.

Postnote 3/24/11: At the highest theoretical level, 1/8th oz of the bitters (several dashes) would still be less than the average amount of nicotine inhaled in a cigarette (around 1 mg).

clementine bitters

Since clementines were in season, I decided to develop some bitters based on them. In my one ounce tester trials [1], I noticed that licorice and tea leaves worked rather well as did some nonsurprising ones like gentian, cinnamon, and chamomile. The flavors in the clementine peel were not very conducive to strong bitter flavors, so I had to tone down the levels as compared to my other bitters.

One of my first scale ups used Darjeeling Muscatel tea leaves and this turned out to be way too bitter as an alcohol-based extraction. Instead I used a steeped version as the water portion of the bitters, although I could have had the tea leaves in a tea ball and removed them after a day or so.

Yarm's Clementine Bitters
• 82.4 grams clementine peels (3-4 clementines)
• 1.2 grams juniper berries (split)
• 1.2 grams wormwood
• 5.4 grams chamomile flowers
• 5.4 grams licorice root
• 3.7 grams cinnamon stick
• 3.6 grams gentian root
• 7.2 grams dried orange peel
• 3.6 grams cardamom pod

• Infuse in 12 oz of Bacardi 151 + 6 oz of Darjeeling Muscatel tea (cooled) for 5 days. Filter through a coffee filter.
• Final volume: 13 oz
• Added: 4 oz caramelized sugar syrup (take 3 oz sugar by volume, caramelize in a pot it over a medium heat, and add 6 oz of boiling water to dissolve the sugar) to make the final volume 17 oz.
• Bottle (6 bottles x ~3 oz.)

The caramelized sugar part made the bitters a lot like Fee's style which are rather sweet due to their use of sugar and glycerol and are very flavor forward and low on the bitter ingredient levels. The effect was an initial sweet taste, followed by a wave of clementine and other flavors, and then bitterness on the swallow. The batch that got bottled used inferior clementines as compared to the ones I had at the beginning of the season. Three of the better peels weighed the same as four of these not to mention having a sweeter and more flavorful taste. Other changes I might do next time is to use a more herbal tea such as jasmine. And perhaps cut out or reduce the juniper berries which added too sharp of a note at the end. The licorice could have been upped a little although it was definitely detectable and added a great flavor at this concentration.

I bottled this batch on Sunday and did not have a chance to experiment with them at home before delivering a bottle to John Gertsen at Drink. He asked what I was in the mood for and I told him something with Old Tom Gin. John asked if an old school Martini would work. I replied with a request for sweet vermouth instead of dry, and John countered by lifting up a bottle of Dolin sweet vermouth to my delight!

Martini
• 2 1/4 Hayman's Old Tom Gin
• 3/4 oz Dolin Sweet Vermouth
• 2 dash Clementine Bitters
Stir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Twist lemon rind over the top of the drink, rim edge of glass, and discard.

The clementine notes were rather strong at first and married well with the lemon oil. Later, the more bitter notes started coming out in the drink and interacting with the vermouth. One of the most intriguing ones was how the accents of the wormwood from the bitters mirrored the hints of wormwood in the Dolin vermouth.

Overall, I am pleased with the results of these bitters although I am not finished with tinkering with this recipe. I am curious to see how these bitters would do in a whiskey drink of some sort with a good starting point being an Rye Old Fashioned perhaps with a dash of Angostura to round out the bitters profile.

[1] Generally, I do 6 one ounce trials using the same alcohol and flavor component in each and vary the rest with 2-4 other botanicals. Usually it is a bittering agent or two and an aromatic agent or two (some ingredients do fall under both categories). Everything is weighed out; however, my scale is not very accurate around 0.1-0.2 grams so things are approximate. I do tasting notes every day or so using a cocktail straw to pick up a few drops and note which flavors work well and which do not. And note which flavors need to be toned down or boosted in level. From there, I pick the best ones or parts of the best ones (generally from the best 2 +/- 1) and combine it in a recipe with the addition of other botanicals that might fill in the gaps. My scale-up is usually to a 16-24 oz range (although the output volume is often lower due to losses in dried botanicals absorbing liquid and losses in filtration).

celery bitters

Back in the 1800's and early 1900's, a variety of snake oil-like medicines full of bitter botanicals found their way into cocktail mixing glasses for their flavor and not their medicinal claims. One of them was celery bitters which were sold by many companies including Brod, Gold Lion, Gladstone, and Paine (a bottle collector's page here). Celery seeds have a celery odor and taste with an extra bit of bitterness to them that mixologists of yore found to be quite tasty in certain cocktails.

Up until recently, celery bitters were a defunct bar reagent. The German company, the Bitter Truth, has concocted some; however, I have not spotted a bottle in Massachusetts and the best I could do is pay for it to be shipped over here. Considering the last time I had bitters shipped to my house (Peychaud's) which resulted in the only package I have ever had turn up as missing but officially "delivered" by the USPS, I decided to wait. Impatience took over and I tried my own hand at a recipe.

I designed this recipe having never tasted the Bitter Truth's apparently amazing product and only heard that it had citrus tones to it. I decided to take it in a different direction. I was inspired by the concept of a British soda containing dandelion and burdock[1] and based the recipe around celery seeds and these two botanicals:

Yarm's Celery Bitters
• 40 grams Celery Seed
• 10 grams Burdock Root
• 10 grams Barberry Root
• 5 grams Dandelion Leaf
• 5 grams Gentian
• 5 grams Cardamon Pod
• 3 grams Spearmint (fresh)
• 2 grams Corriander Seed
Add 10 oz Bacardi 151 proof Rum and 5 oz water. Let infuse for 10 days with frequent mixing. Filter through a coffee filter, and bottle.

My first scaled-up batch of bitters were rather delightful during the infusion process in the overproof rum. However, when I added the water to cut down the alcohol, it underwent an intense louching. Much of the flavor precipitated out of solution and later attempts to increase the alcohol only helped slightly. The second batch was not as flavorful either due to a differently sourced batch of celery seeds or because I was only using 100 proof alcohol instead of 150 proof during the infusion process.

I discussed this project with Jackson Cannon of Eastern Standard, and he recommended trying it with Pimm's since it works well with vegetable flavors (although Hendrick's gin might also work in the same way). My idea was to use rhum agricole to match the funkiness of bitters. To bring the two together, I changed Eastern Standard's recipe for the Rye and Dry accordingly:

Rhum and Dry
• 1 oz Rhum JM
• 1 oz Pimm's No. 1
• 1 oz Noilly Prat Dry Vermouth
• 3 dash Celery Bitters
Stir on ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

Jackson was right in how the celery flavors would work well with the Pimm's, and I found the herbalness of the rest of the bitters to complement the rhum agricole. The cocktail had a rather pleasant celery aftertaste with a bit of extra complexity over the dry vermouth flavors. While the bitters seem to have a much less limited range than say Angostura in cocktails, I was not disappointed with the end result.


[1] Nov 12, 2008 postnote: A blog I just found today gives a great homemade dandelion and burdock syrup recipe for making your own soda:
http://www.tristanstephenson.com/wordpress/2008/03/23/homemade-dandelion-burdock-recipe/

grapefruit bitters

While collecting bitters recipes from across the web, I found several for grapefruit bitters. Instead of following one recipe, I made a hybrid of the two I liked the best. One was from John Paul Deragon and the other from Chuck Taggart. With the Deragon recipe, I was intrigued by his flavoring with lavender in addition to other herbs such as gentian and spearmint, the latter of which was abundantly growing in my garden. With the Taggart recipe, I used his heavy-on-the-pith and bitterness focus on the grapefruit in addition to his use of corriander for an extra bite. My recipe based on these sources was the following:

Grapefruit Bitters
• 16 oz Bacardi 151 Rum
• 3 oz Water
• 160 g Grapefruit Rind (one rind with pith)
• 20 g Grapefruit Zest (zest of one grapefruit)
• 12 g Fresh Ginger (diced)
• 4 g Fresh Spearmint
• 10 g Dried Lavender
• 2 g Coriander Seed
Let steep for 10 days and filter. Extract the absorbed liquid from grapefruit pith using back of spoon and pressure, and filter.
• 5 tsp Sugar
Heat in a pot on a medium flame until the sugar is melted and is a light to medium brown, then add
• 3 tsp Water
Add to filtered liquid, mix, and bottle.

The end product was rather strong on the lavender although Andrea enjoyed that aspect more than I did. Perhaps halving the lavender next time would fit my tastes better. Here is one drink I made that seemed to work well with the flavors in these bitters:

RinQuinQuin Martini
• 2 oz Plymouth Gin
• 1/4 oz RinQuinQuin
• 1/4 oz Noilly Prat Dry Vermouth
• 3 dashes Grapefruit Bitters
Stir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass

RinQuinQuin is a French quinine-containing aromatized wine flavored with peach leaf, skin, and kernel (instead of the fruit itself). Read more about it in the Bunnyhugs blog which is where I got the idea for this drink (I was inspired by their RinQuinQuin Versper). The peach and grapefruit flavors in this recipe complement each other quite nicely.

nasturtium bitters

After remembering the nasturtium-infused gin we made last year, I decided to craft some cocktail bitters around this peppery tasting flower that grows around the border of our vegetable garden as well as elsewhere in our yard.
I used botanical to alcohol and water ratios from various recipes I found (and there is great variation through out the recipes) and chose my first recipe. Version 1 was similar to the recipe below and started out with a very good nasturtium and orange aroma during days 1-2. By days 4-5, it was way too bitter when used in a 3:1 Plymouth gin:Noilly Prat martini; in fact, it was horribly bitter. I ended up having to dump that batch and to scrap the milk thistle and cut back wormwood 5 fold. The experience taught me to pilot lot new recipes in the small scale -- such as the Celery Bitters that are ongoing which started as 6 jars of 1 oz size.
The recipe that I ended up going with and bottling:

Yarm's Nasturtium Bitters
• 12 oz Bacardi 151 rum
• 4 oz water
• 45 grams nasturtium flowers (wet weight)
• 10 grams dried orange peel
• 8 grams cardamom pods (sliced open)
• 7.5 grams cinnamon stick
• 5 grams gentian
• 1 gram wormwood
• 2 grams star anise
Let steep for 14 days.
• 12 oz water
• 30 grams nasturtium flowers (wet weight)
Muddle the flowers in a separate jar and store in fridge overnight.
Filter the alcohol portion through a coffee filter.
Wash the botanicals with the nasturtium water, and filter this wash. Combine with alcohol filtrate.
Bottle.

The recipe does not reflect that I added some of the botanicals after sampling them at day 4. I doubled the cinnamon and cardamom, added the star anise, upped the gentian from 1 to 5 grams, and added the 4 oz of water to keep the herbs submerged. One difference was between the first and second batches of bitters, it rained a lot and the flavor quality of the nasturtiums changed. The first were rather sharp and peppery, and the second were more tea-like akin to a rooibos which might be why I added the second round of botanicals.

My favorite recipe with them so far is:

Rum Old Fashioned
• 1 1/2 oz Medium-bodied rum (Ron Zacapa 15 year)
• 1/4 oz Gomme (or simple) syrup
• 2-3 dashes of Nasturtium bitters
Stir with ice and strain into a rocks glass.

Enjoy!

August 2010 post-script: I remade the bitters this year. It was a less rainy season this year, so the flowers had more flavor and aroma. I, therefore, scrapped the 12 ounces of muddle flower water and swapped in 6 ounces of water. I used a new batch of cinnamon that made this note more prominent; surprisingly, the cardamom (same batch) seems more dominant. Perhaps it was the muddling of the cardamom pods that helped.

boker's bitters

I recently became interested in making my own cocktail bitters in part to revive some old recipes I had been finding and in part to try my hand at creating some new ones. To do the latter, I wanted to try some of the former first.

Besides a few recipes in Imbibe, there were three good online resources that I found. Jamie Boudreau's How to Make Bitters post was the first I found and it gave the general breakdown of the bittering agent, the flavor, and the solvent besides giving a few recipes. The Art of Drink's bitters recipes collection was the next one that I discovered. I used the wide variety of bitters to plan out my botanicals order. And the last was a recent article I found in the
DrinkDogma blog although I had already started my bitters project by the time I discovered this resource.

I started with Boker's Bitters which was in Boudreau's, Art of Drink, and Imbibe. The recipe in Imbibe gave a tip on halving the water added at the end to convert these old stomach bitters (meant to be drunk straight) to cocktail bitters (meant to be added dash-wise). I had ordered a bunch of herbs from the Hippies (read a livejournal post I wrote about it) to make this recipe and others, and a digital scale from eBay.
Here's my scaled down version of the recipe:

Boker's Bitters
• 5.6 grams Quassia
• 5.6 grams Calamus Root
• 5.6 grams Catechu (Betel Nut)
• 3.8 grams Cardamom Pods
• 7.5 grams Dried Orange Peel
Add 8 oz Bacardi 151. Stir daily. Let infuse for 10-14 days. Filter through a coffee filter. Rinse the botanicals twice with 8 oz of water and filter. Total volume is 24 oz. Bottle.

After the 12 days of soaking and two water rinses, these herbs looked rather pale like soggy wood chips instead of this bounty of color.

After bottling it, it was time to try it in a cocktail. CocktailDB had 5 recipes using Boker's. This is the one that Andrea and I made last night:

Submarine Cocktail
• 1 1/2 oz Gin
• 1/2 oz Red Dubonnet
• 1/2 oz Dry Vermouth
• 1 dash Boker's Bitters
Stir in a mixing glass with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

The bitters did not disappoint. A very aromatic and flavorful one that has some similarities to Fee's Whiskey Barrel Aged Bitters. It worked rather well in a Manhattan when I was monitoring the bitters progress after 4-5 days, and took the drink to a new level as compared to Angostura.
The finished product. I used 100 mL European-style dropper bottles bought from a company John Gertsen recommended called SpecialtyBottle.com. The total yield was 6 bottles (the bottles easily hold over 100 mL).