A Bitters Pill To Swallow

We’ve all seen that little brown bottle on the bottom shelf of the liquor store.  You know the one: it has a slightly oversized label that extends over the fat part of the bottle.  There is probably a bottle in your home bar right now.  You bought it years ago to put in a particular drink that you didn’t like and you haven’t opened it since.  So there it sits, in cocktail purgatory.  You don’t know why you keep it; it doesn’t know why it has to sit there unused.  I’m here to tell you that a functional relationship between you and bitters can be salvaged. 

To start, there are two different varieties of bitters: cocktail bitters and digestive bitters.  Digestive bitters can be consumed straight and can be served in measurable quantities.  Examples of digestive bitters are Campari, Chartreuse, Benedictine, and Absinthe.  For the sake of brevity (and perhaps laziness), we will only be covering cocktail bitters, (specifically aromatic bitters) in this post. 

Cocktail bitters are made by soaking herbs and spices in alcohol, which extracts and concentrates the flavors of the ingredients.  With that in mind, there are a variety of recipes that correspond to today’s market offerings of bitters.  The bottle with the oversized label is Angostura bitters, probably the best known and most recognizable type of bitters.  It’s also the easiest to find.  The Old Fashioned is an example of a cocktail that utilizes Angostura.

Old Fashioned

1 sugar cube

1 tsp water

2 dashes Angostura bitters

2 oz rye or bourbon whiskey

Muddle sugar, water, and bitters together until the sugar is mostly dissolved.  Fill glass with ice and then add the whiskey.  Garnish with a twist of orange peel and a cherry.

Another example of an aromatic bitter similar to Angostura is Peychaud’s Bitters.  Peychaud’s is the vital component in the Sazerac, which I covered in an earlier post about The Monarch.  Other examples of aromatic bitters include Fee Brother’s and Scrappy’s. 

There are tons of other types of cocktail bitters beside aromatic, from lime to chocolate to apple to lavender.  I will make an entirely separate post that deals with exotic bitters.

Do you have a bottle of bitters in your bar?  What’s your favorite drink that contains bitters?  Comments are always appreciated, and questions can be directed to @rebellionwhisky.  

The Manhattan

I’ll make no secret about it:  I love whiskey.  More specifically, I love bourbon.  What makes whiskey bourbon? According to United States Code of Federal Regulations, Title 27, Section 5.22(i)(1):

“Bourbon whisky”, “rye whisky”, “wheat whisky”, “malt whisky”, or “rye malt whisky” is whisky produced at not exceeding 160° proof from a fermented mash of not less than 51 percent corn, rye, wheat, malted barley, or malted rye grain, respectively, and stored at not more than 125° proof in charred new oak containers; and also includes mixtures of such whiskies of the same type.

Right, what you need to know there is bourbon has to be 51% corn.  (Note that, contrary to popular belief, bourbon does not have to be made in Bourbon County, Kentucky.)  From there, however, the amount of adjuncts (other grains) can vary wildly.  With this in mind, you have to be careful when selecting bourbon for particular types of cocktails.  Bourbons with a significant amount of wheat, such as Maker’s Mark or W.L. Weller, tend to be smoother than bourbons with more rye.  Rye imparts a spicy character into the bourbon as can be seen in Bulleit (pronounced “bullet”) bourbon.

So, how does this apply to making the superior cocktail?  Let’s take a fairly straightforward cocktail to see if we can taste the difference.            

The Manhattan, my wife’s favorite, and a cocktail that I have shared with her frequently as of late.  Normally, we would make her Manhattan’s with bourbon, but after some research (you know, Google), I found that the time-honored Manhattan is made with rye whiskey, rather than bourbon.  I liked the bourbon version, but if the traditionalists say rye, then I would give it a shot.  Here are the recipes for the two cocktails that we compared:

Bourbon Based Manhattan

2 oz Bulleit bourbon

½ oz sweet vermouth

3 dashes of Angostura bitters

Rye Based Manhattan

2 oz Bulleit 95% rye whiskey

½ oz sweet vermouth

3 dashes of Angostura bitters

I chose Bulleit bourbon because of its high rye content, thinking that a rye based bourbon will be closer to the traditional Manhattan recipe.  With that said, these two cocktails are like night and day.  The bitters work much better with the rye whiskey.   The vegetable flavors imparted by the bitters work significantly better with the bite of the rye.  With the sweeter, smoother bourbon, the cocktail is far too sweet.  Granted, I wouldn’t have made this distinction without comparing the bourbon version to the rye.  Still, that’s what this blog is all about: discovery.  There is no comparison between the two beverages, and I will never make/purchase a Manhattan without rye whiskey as the backbone again.

How do you take your Manhattan?  Comments are always welcome, as are suggestions for future drink experiments.