What are cocktail bitters?

The concept behind a cocktail bitter is fairly straightforward: concentrate the flavors of a bitter agent — like herbs, roots, and barks — alongside an aromatic agent like lavender, citrus, other fruits, and berries.

Cocktail bitters are the salt and pepper of your cocktails. Would you grill up a steak or a pile of veggies without a little salt or pepper to draw out the flavors? Probably not. It's hard to argue with the taste difference between a properly spiced meal and a bland alternative. So why are you leaving your cocktails unspiced?

If you've been to a great bar and had a fantastic cocktail, the chances are pretty good they added cocktail bitters to make it their own personal signature drink. Of course, if you're drinking a classic like a Sazerac or an Old Fashioned, you've probably already encountered bitters in your travels.

Cocktail bitters enhance great drinks, elevate standard drinks, and can fix an unbalanced hollow drinking experience. Find a drink with a great start and finish but missing the middle? Or a drink that works well but falls flat at the end? A bitter can tie those pieces together and make a full, joyful experience.

What is a Tincture?

We tend to lump them all together here at AwesomeDrinks, but a tincture is more of a single unified flavor. As an example, a Serrano Cocktail Spice will bring heat to your beverage because it's infused with heat from peppers — but it doesn't bring a bitter herb or root like gentian, wormwood, or cherry bark. A single focused infusion is a tincture (vanilla extract is a popular example), but a blend of herbs and spices brings you the traditional cocktail bitter used in so many classics.

When to Use Cocktail Bitters?

Spoiler alert: as much as you can. A standard 5 oz bottle of cocktail bitters will create about 50 cocktails, so don't worry about running out anytime soon. Some of the more rare handcrafted bitters can cost upwards of $22, but you'll be able to craft a great deal of drinks.

Over time you can purchase and explore other flavor profiles across the variety of bitter brands. You'll build a nice bank of aromatic flavors to add to your own cocktail designs or enhance classic ones. Lavender bitters in champagne, cherry bark vanilla bitters in diet coke, grapefruit bitters in ginger ale — the combination of uses can go a long way.

Get creative. Pair up a new bitter with an old drink and see what it does to the tasting experience.