the making of bitters

I'm not quite sure what got into me a few months back but I was really excited at the idea bitters. A little flair for my little drink. I have these images in my head of some pharmacist-looking chap 150 years ago in London mixing ingredients in a oak barrel making the same concoction that I am. I wish I could be that cool. Rather, I downloaded some stuff of the internet, and being the lazy Gen X'er that I am I then ordered ingredients, also from the internet, to make my first two batches of bitters.

I tried my hand at two recipes, a Cherry Bitters and "Regan's Orange Bitters Recipe No 5". Using a mix of ingredients like dried lemon peel, dried cherry bark, wormwood, licorice root, and 100 proof whiskey in one and dried orange peel, cardamon seeds, caraway seeds, coriander seeds, quassia chips, and grain alochol in the other.

I used a very large mason jar to basically let the flavor from all of the ingredients soak into the booze. Every day you need to shake this big jar of mess. Two to three weeks later you have bitters. The hardest part of the entire ordeal is separating the liquid from the solids. The instructions I had said to use cheese cloth. I don't know a lot about cheese cloth but I found this to be a big mess. I ended up using a slightly oversized funnel and coffee filters. It was a slow process and I used about 8 filters for both of my batches but the results were clear debris free bitters.

So the fun part begun after we were finished 'cooking'. We found good use of bitters in many a cocktail, topping off a fruity mess or strategically placed in a champagne cocktail. I'm generousness sharing my wares, if you're interested in a taste let me know I'll have you over for a drink.