For cocktail geeks, making your own bitters is akin to getting a prison tattoo: You’re in the gang and no one’s going to mess with you (read “question your cocktail chops”). Given this comparison, you’re probably thinking, wow, making bitters must be difficult, time consuming, and painful. It’s not.
Grab a bunch of dried barks, roots, spices, and herbs, a quantity of high-proof booze, and a bunch of lidded jars—and you’re 80% there. The rest is simply mixing, waiting, and straining.
Like a jelly-of-the-month club, your finished homemade bitters will keep on giving, adding depth and complexity to untold cocktails, as well as foods (try adding drops to vinaigrettes, sauces, soups, and stews).
Whether I’m cooking dinner or mixing a drink, I always want the ability to season to taste; with that in mind, I’ve created more of a bitters kit with a couple suggested combinations, rather than a single recipe. The first step is making an arsenal of infusions, each a high-proof liquor infused with one ingredient for a specific amount of time—like mint-infused vodka or allspice-infused rum. Then, to create the bitters formulation you like, strain and combine the infusions in varying proportions to achieve the desired flavor. For example, I’ve found that mixing infusions of lemon, bitter orange, quassia bark, ginger, and coriander creates a delightful blend of citrus bitters. Also good to know: Because I’m using readily available high-proof booze (not pure grain alcohol), these bitters aren’t as concentrated as the professionally crafted stuff, so it’s necessary to use a heavier hand when adding them to drinks.
After mixing up my Old-Fashioned Bitters recipe, you might decide that it needs more gentian, cardamom, or bitter orange (and while you’ll be wrong, you’ll also have the tools to help you make that mistake).
Consider yourself inked.
Step #1 SOURCE IT
Step #2 ▼
Start with high-quality dried barks, roots, spices, and herbs. I find everything I need in the pantry at Mountain Rose Herbs. I like to crush the spices and toast them in a dry skillet for a couple of minutes to release their oils.
Step #2
Step #3 ▼
Combine the dried components with the highest-proof alcohol you can legally get your hands on: 101-proof bourbon, 100-proof vodka, 151-proof rum. I’ve found that some of the components are complemented by bourbon’s sweetness or rum’s distinctive spice, while others show best in neutral-tasting vodka.
Step #3 INFUSE IT
Step #4 ▼
Let the infusions sit for anywhere from 24 hours to 5 days. My ratio of stuff to booze is pretty high, so infusion times are cut significantly (no month-long wait here). I also skip the annoying (and thankfully unnecessary) step of daily agitation. As I discovered when working out my Cold-Brew Coffee recipe, agitation has very little effect on infusion strength.
Step #4 STRAIN IT
Step #5 ▼
After the infusions have sat for the appropriate amount of time, simply strain them through a coffee filter-lined mesh strainer and transfer them to clean, labeled jars.
Step #5 ORGANIZE IT
Step #6 ▼
I treat the finished infusions as I do my spice rack (though I don’t actually own a spice rack): they are base ingredients that can be combined to create new and interesting flavors.
Step #6 BLEND IT
Step #7 ▼
I’ve included my recipes for Old-Fashioned Bitters and Citrus Bitters. For both, simply measure the separate infusions into a measuring cup and pour the contents through a funnel into a dropper bottle (which makes for easy and accurate cocktail seasoning).
Step #7 DRINK IT
Finally, mix up a drink and add drops to taste.
About the Author: Dan Souza
9 Comments
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wait, if I can get my hands on pure grain alcohol, should i use that to make bitters?
Marshall – You will be able to pull more of the alcohol soluble flavor compounds from the ingredients with grain alcohol (often 95% booze and 5% water) but less of the water soluble compounds. When using grain alcohol, a common technique to recapture the loss of water soluble compounds is to simmer the barks, herbs, and spices in water after straining them from the alcohol. The infused water is then added to the alcohol infusion to make a mixture at roughly 40% alcohol. This will definitely produce more potent bitters, but personally I’d rather spend the extra time mixing drinks and consuming them.
Whats the best alcohol to use? When you say grain alcohol 151 comes to mind, i have heard that is to high of a ratio of alcohol. Is 80 proof Vodka better? That being said dose the quality of the booze matter, bottom to mid shelf?
Andrew – Check out the recipe for more specifics. I use Smirnoff 100 proof vodka, Wild Turkey 101 proof bourbon, and Bacardi 151 proof rum. I prefer mid-level priced booze as opposed to the really bottom shelf options.
What should we do about mold in our infusions? We steeped and strained each of the ingredients and left the strained infusions in their jars for a month. We have retuned to blend them and found mold at the bottom of our jars! Will this kill us? Is there a way to save our infusions?
Kmorgensteinfuerst – I would double check that what you are seeing at the bottom of your jars is indeed mold and not just sediment. I’ve had the infusions sitting around for months now and have seen no signs of mold, but there is a fine sediment at the bottom of a few. A 50 percent alcohol solution is a pretty inhospitable place for mold, and if you did have it, I’d expect to see it on top of the liquid where it is exposed to oxygen. Please let me know what you find upon further inspection.
Dan–thanks so much for the follow-up. We strained, let the infusions sit for a few days, and then re-examined. It looks like it may have just been sediment that formed weird shapes and textures in our jars. We’re going to move forward with mixing and tasting. Long live experimentation!
Hi Dan! I was so eager to make some grapefruit bitters, that I accidentally put the the sugar and the water (meant for the simple syrup, of course) right in with the grapefruit and coriander! Yikes!! Have I ruined it completely?
Thanks so much for your detailed recipes, I will surely read it more carefully next time around! :/
Thanks!!
Jenna – Were you at the blending stage of the process? Or did this happen while you were trying to make the infusions? If the former, I’d taste it and see what you have–might be something like a citrus liqueur? If the latter, you’ll probably need to wait a long time for the infusion to get flavorful as you’ve seriously diluted the alcohol, but there’s no harm is riding it out to see what happens. Keep us posted.