Difficulty: Easy! Time: Patience is Required.
Making homemade bitters for cocktails is similar to making a homemade liqueur. You can think of a basic bitters recipe as being similar to making a very strong tea with alcohol in place of water. You simply place the flavoring ingredients in a high-proof alcoholic liquor of your choice and let the mixture sit for some time until the flavors from the ingredients are infused into the liquor.
The difference between bitters and liqueurs is that you use a whole lot of one or more very bitter ingredients, gentian root being a classic choice, and generally higher proportions of other ingredients.
This is because you want a very concentrated flavor, including a lot of bitter taste, in your final bitters creation. Although sugar can be added to round out the flavor of bitters, you use less sugar than you would in a liqueur.
While liqueurs can be enjoyed by themselves or as a mixer with another alcohol, only a few dashes of bitters are used to flavor a cocktail. Consider those little dashes like flavor bullets. Any drink will be instantly changed, and probably improved a great deal. Rather than just sweet and sour, you’ve now added a third and most important element to the flavor profile: bitter.
This is not to mention the other flavors within the bitters, and the aromatics (scent) it adds, all of which add to the experience of a great cocktail. The days of syrupy sweet mixed drinks are passing. We are going back to the pre-prohibition times when cocktails were full-flavored and complex, except now, they are even more so.
Keep in mind that your homemade bitters will not be as concentrated as store-bought bitters, so you’ll usually have to use more of them.
At the end of this article will be a basic “old time” recipe for gentian bitters. To this recipe, anything can be added or subtracted. The process is the same regardless of the ingredients used.
Before we get to the bitters recipe, let’s go over the equipment and the types of ingredients needed. I have tried to make it as easy as possible for you to find the equipment, and some typical ingredients, on Amazon, but feel free to visit a specialty store or another of your favorite online stores.
Equipment Needed
You only need a few simple pieces of equipment to make homemade bitters.
- Two Large Jars with Lids
- Fine mesh strainer
- Cheesecloth for filtering (although a coffee filter can be used, it is very slow. Several layers of cheesecloth work much better)
- Cocktail bitter bottles or other small bottles(hot sauce dasher bottles work great and eliminate the need for a separate dropper)
- Funnel
Optional
Labels for bottles
- MULTI-USE FUNCTIONALITY - Use these versatile bottles at the bar to store bitters, infusions, and tonics.And be the vintage clear decorative bottles with removable glass stopper,perfect for displaying flowers, essential oil reeds, or for table centerpieces at a wedding
- CLASSIC METAL ACCENTS - Designed with classic gold dashers to complement your barware and decor.
- LEAK-RESISTANT SEAL - Removable glass stoppers are outfitted to create a snug and leak resistant seal. Help to keep the contents of the bitters bottles freshantique.
- ELEGENT SHAPE - Classic jewel,birdcage,donatello bottle shape with jewel pattern along the body, giving classy and professional scent to your bar set. Add vintage style to your decor with thesedecorative embossed clear glass bottles.
- CONSISTENT DASHING - These bitters bottle with the dashers top, which are specifically designed to dispense carefully and evenly. A must-have for successful cocktails!
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Types of Ingredients for Homemade Bitters
Liquors: you can use any sort of liquor you want, but it is best not to use a liquor with a flavor added, unless you want to make a bitters that features that flavor.
For instance, you could use a cinnamon whiskey to make a cinnamon bitters. Remember that whiskey is not a “neutral” spirit — it will add a lot of its own flavor to your bitters, which may or may not be desirable to you.
Your choice may depend on the types of cocktails in which you plan to use your bitters. If you plan on making old-fashioned cocktails, like the “Old Fashioned” or Manhattans, use whiskey.
If you want to make rum-based drinks, you can use a dark rum or a whiskey.
If you want to make the kind of fruity drinks that generally rely on vodka, use vodka. Try to get something that is at least 100 proof, or 50% alcohol by volume (this simplifies your choices). Grain alcohol can be mixed with another, more flavorful, liquor to boost the proof.
You don’t need to use top-shelf liquor for bitters, the cheap stuff should work very well, but it is up to you. This is your bitters! A cheap whiskey bitter can still be used in a good whiskey and will still add that oomph you’re looking for.
The most important part, really, is the high percentage of alcohol which will extract the many bitter and other components from the ingredients.
The ingredients for bitters are often called “botanicals.” This is just a fancy way of saying that the ingredients come from plants.
- Bitter ingredients: bitter roots, herbs, spices, and bitter citrus peels can be used to make the bitter component, the most important part of the recipe. You can use more than one bitter ingredient. Up to half of the ingredients will be bittering ingredients.
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- Examples of bitter ingredients: gentian root, cinchona bark, angelica root, wild cherry bark, sasparilla, black walnut leaf, hops, licorice root, citrus peel (orange peel, grapefruit peel).
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- Other flavoring and aromatic ingredients: Almost anything you can imagine to add desirable flavors and aromas: Various spices can be used, such as anise seed, star anise, caraway, cardamom, cassia cinnamon bark, juniper berries, vanilla, ginger cloves, allspice, nutmeg, etc. Many of these spices themselves are quite bitter and will work along with the primary bitter ingredients.
- Herbs and flowers: Flowers both flavor and perfume your bitters. Chamomile is a classic bitters ingredient, and lavender is very popular today. Other choices include hibiscus and rose. All sorts of herbs can be used, including of course, mint and all herbs in the mint family. Sage, rosemary, thyme, etc. are other examples.
- Other ingredients: Nuts, fruits (including dried fruits like raisins), coffee beans (another bitter), cacao nibs, etc.
Basic Bitters Recipe
Of course, any good bitters starts with liquor. We will use four cups of liquor altogether. You can, however, use all one liquor or combine different liquors.
For example, you could use two cups of whiskey and two cups of rum. Or, you could use all vodka. It is really up to you.
This basic recipe is a gentian-orange bitters. You can take out the gentian or the orange and add any ingredients of your choice. Chamomile would work well with this basic recipe.
Ingredients
4 cups liquor (whiskey, rum, vodka, etc.)
2 tbsp gentian root
1 tbsp green cardamom pods
2 tbsp dried bitter orange peel, or several strips of fresh peel of orange, lemon, lime, etc.)
2 cups hot water (not needed until the end)
Sweetener, if desired
Instructions
Combine the liquor and all the ingredients in a large glass jar with a sealable lid. Place the lid on the jar and seal tightly.
Shake the jar vigorously and set it in a kitchen cabinet or other room-temperature place (keep away from high heat sources) for 14 to 21 days. Shake the jar well every day. The longer you rest it the more flavor will be imparted to the alcohol. Bitters are meant to be strong.
Line a fine-mesh strainer with a couple layers of cheesecloth and strain the contents of the jar into a clean bowl. Once all the liquid has strained through, gather up the cheesecloth into a ball to squeeze out all the excess liquid you can.
Set aside the filtered liquid. Place the now-drained solid ingredients into a saucepan and mash them with a spoon or other instrument. Then pour the 2 cups hot water into the saucepan with the solid ingredients and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to low and simmer for 15 minutes.
Allow the heated mixture to cool a bit.
Strain the mixture through a sieve (without the cheesecloth) into a clean bowl.
If you would like to sweeten your bitters, you can now add up to 3/4 cups of sugar, brown sugar, palm sugar, or another sweetener to the liquid. Allow the liquid to cool completely.
Combine the cooled liquid and the alcohol bitters you strained before together. Transfer the new mix to a large clean glass jar with a sealable lid, just like you did at the beginning. Shake the jar well and let this second jar rest for another 7 days, shaking vigorously once a day.
After 7 days, stop shaking the jar (before, you introduced some solid sediments into the mixture because you didn’t use cheesecloth [on purpose], now you want to let the sediments settle, making it easy to completely filter them later).
After the jar has rested undisturbed for 7 days, carefully drain and filter the liquid through a fine-mesh strainer and several layers of cheesecloth into a pourable container. Try to leave any sediments in the bottom of the jar. Your bitters are now done.
Using a funnel, pour the bitters into several small jars, like the hot sauce dasher bottles recommended above. Make some great cocktails and add a few dashes of your bitters to taste.
This same method can be used to make any kind of bitters you would like.
Further Notes on Some Classic Bitters
You may find sources advising the use of “burnt sugar”, which is basically sugar that has been caramelized. If sugar is burnt enough, it will lend a bitter flavor all its own.
However, old-time recipes for bitters that called for burnt sugar were only using it for color, i.e. “caramel coloring.” Brown sugar will lend color and some sweetness. Molasses can be used as well.
Stoughton’s Bitters (The First Widely Marketed Brand)
If you add colombo root (a.k.a. calumba) a very bitter root often used in aromatic bitters, and chamomile to the above recipe, and omit the cardamom, you’ll have something much like a classic bitters called Stoughton’s Bitters, which was the first brand of bitters to be widely marketed (most bitters were made individually by pharmacists at first).
They were created by Richard Stoughton in England in 1712 and began being exported to the U.S. in 1730. He used a combination of brandy and some grain alcohol as the spirit base. Many classic bitters recipes also call for snakeroot, a toxic herb better left alone.
Decanter Bitters
If you care to explore more old-time recipes for bitters, keep in mind that many of the recipes were for decanter bitters. These were not as strong and were diluted with a lot of water to make them suitable for serving by the glass. To mimic the taste but get a strong bitters, the water must be reduced and the steeping time may need to be lengthened.
Jerry Thomas’ “Own Decanter Bitters” were meant to be served by the glass — the instructions given in his famous book on bartending didn’t even call for any particular period of time for steeping. He simply instructed pouring Santa Cruz rum over the ingredients and serving in pony glasses, and then replacing the rum when the bitters ran out.
His recipe used snakeroot, by the way, which is a liver toxin and illegal for sale. I would advise not worrying about matching the old-time bitters; simply use them for inspiration in creating your own. Many of the roots and herbs used in those days have been determined to be unsafe to use.
Don’t want to make your own bitters? Try some classic gentian-based bitters like Angostura Aromatic Bitters or Peychaud’s.