Alcohol-Free Bitters

There are now three U.S. brands (to my knowledge)

Hello! I’m officially on break from graduate school and excited to get back into some writing this summer. Look for more regular newsletters, upcoming pieces for Vice and Eater, and more.

Today, I want to talk about bitters. There appear to be some misconceptions about which brands are and are not alcoholic, and for whom that does and does not matter. The latter is, of course, up to you, the drinker, but it’s important to have all of the information in order to make that decision, and I continue to find that many people simply don’t have that information. So, immediately below, please find an excerpt from my book, Good Drinks. This is the result of the research I did at the time, but if you have anything to add, please do share in the comments.

Bitters are an aromatic and, yes, often bitter liquid seasoning. Historically, this infusion of roots, barks, spices, herbs, and other botanicals was consumed for its medicinal properties; then sometime in the eighteenth century, Americans took to mixing it into cocktails. Brad Thomas Parsons’s comprehensive Bitters: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All gets into the details, but for our purposes, all you need to know is that the United States had a bitters boom in the early aughts and now there are a zillion flavors and brands from which to choose.

Most of them are made with alcohol, since it’s such an effective extractor of flavor, but because the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) considers bitters to be a food item, they’re not subject to the labeling requirements that TTB enforces. (It’s a different story for potable bitters such as Campari and Aperol, which are regulated as distilled spirits products.) In other words, makers aren’t required to disclose the ABV of their bitters on the bottle. Some do, though, in the name of transparency.

Even Fee Brothers bitters, which many believe are alcohol-free because their base is glycerin, not high-proof vodka or some other neutral grain spirit, actually do contain alcohol. This is because, instead of working with raw ingredients, the company purchases extracts from four flavor houses, and those extracts are made with alcohol. Joe Fee, who along with his sister Ellen was a fourth-generation operator of the family business, told me that their bitters can contain anywhere from around 2% to 36% ABV, depending on the recipe.

Here’s why I bring all of this up: Some recipes in [Good Drinks] call for bitters. Ultimately, because you’re using only a couple dashes in a drink, the amount of alcohol you’re ingesting is statistically insignificant.

Let’s use Angostura bitters as an example: The bottle I’m looking at right now measures 44.7% ABV. If one standard dash equals 1⁄8 teaspoon, and 1 ounce equals 6 teaspoons, then a 5-ounce glass of, say, iced tea topped with three dashes of Angostura bitters is about 0.56% alcohol. Yes, that is technically what the law considers to be alcoholic [0.5%], but (1) only by a hair and (2) as we discussed earlier, this number has little if nothing to do with intoxication. To put this into perspective, the National Institutes of Health considers a standard glass of wine to be 12% alcohol. It’s also worth knowing that most alcohol-based bitters ring in at somewhere between 35% and 45% ABV, so Angostura is on the high end.

Having said all of this, I know some non-drinkers for whom this is a problem. If you’re in their camp, please either choose a bitter labeled with a lower percentage of ABV than Angostura’s, reduce the number of dashes in your drink, sub in a nonalcoholic bitter, or skip those recipes entirely.

Which brings me to the two commercial brands of bitters I know of that are completely devoid of alcohol. One is Dram, based in Salida, Colorado. Co-owner Shae Whitney says she uses glycerin and raw ingredients, a process that limits her.“ Fruits are pretty impossible to penetrate, so we don’t make peach or cherry bitters, for example,” she says. “It’s hard to get delicate flavors into glycerin.” Currently, she sells bitters flavored with palo santo; citrus; lavender–lemon balm; sage; one she calls “black,” which is a combination of black cardamom, black tea, black currants, and black walnuts; and an aromatic bitter made with ginger, fennel, cinnamon, and herbs. Find them—I bought them all!—at dramapothecary.com.

Unlike Dram, El Guapo, based in New Orleans, Louisiana, does use ethanol to extract flavor from certain ingredients, but owner Christa Cotton evaporates the alcohol before mixing the flavors with vegetable-based glycerin and bottling the bitters.“All of our SKUs are 0% ABV when they hit store shelves,” she says. You can buy her Good Food Award–winning chicory pecan bitters, among others, at elguapobitters.com.

And now there’s a third brand on the market!

In February I spoke with Carly and Ian Blessing, former The French Laundry sommeliers and the wife-and-husband duo behind alcohol-free bitters brand All the Bitter, which they launched right around the time of our meeting. Carly and Ian quit drinking after the birth of their two children, so not only had they been looking for alcohol-free versions of Angostura, Peychaud's, and Regan's orange bitters, but also, this endeavor seemed worthwhile to them from a hospitality perspective. Dashed into a nonalcoholic drink, Angostura bitters will not get you drunk, but, as Ian told me from the couple’s Chico, California home, "[a chef] wouldn't add 1% of bacon fat to a veggie burger." I like that way of thinking about it.

They went for the three classic flavors of bitters because, while they're both fans of Dram and El Guapo's work, "there wasn't really anything that felt like a direct one-to-one replacement for the bitters that you find in 99% of cocktail recipes," Ian said. "The driver to do this was thinking of the easiest way to adopt alcohol-free drinks in bars and restaurants, and that's simply to make your standard offerings nonalcoholic. It's easy now to just plug in these alcohol-free alternatives and make the cocktails that everybody already knows."

The plug-and-play approach doesn't always work, especially when you're trying to mimic a Manhattan or Sazerac or other spirits-heavy drinks, but Ian says citrusy cocktails like South Sides are well-suited to it. (He does, though, make an alcohol-free Old-Fashioned at home, which I would find…challenging! "What works best is a small tweak to the drink, while still keeping the spirit of it the same. So, when we make an Old-Fashioned, we use maple syrup instead of the sugar, because otherwise you're just drinking nonalcoholic whiskey with two dashes of bitters, which isn't very satisfying. When you add even just that little bit of texture and depth of flavor from the maple syrup, suddenly it's a more enjoyable cocktail.")

It took about a year of testing and tweaking bitters recipes using a variety of herbs and other botanicals and a glycerin base, but eventually, "we got it right," Ian said. I concur. Buy All the Bitter here.

To borrow a (“haunting,” to some) phrase from The Daily podcast, here's what else you need to know today:

• Entrepreneur and author Hitha Palepu said something very nice about me in her newsletter recently.

• A Cup of Jo asked me about my engagement story, and I shared.

• Speaking of bitters, there's a recipe for tea-based, DIY nonalcoholic bitters from D.C.–based bartender Hunter Douglas in Good Drinks, which you can buy here.

More soon.

xo