Bitters are essential for any true classic cocktail, and the most well-known and popular brand is Angostura. Before the term cocktail became a generic term for a mixed alcoholic drink, bitters were part of the definition of cocktail: a spirit, sugar, water, and bitters. If you want to make an Old Fashioned and you don’t have any of these classic bitters on hand, you can make a good one from any number of other bitters brands. But, if you don’t have any cocktail bitters at all, is there an Angostura bitters substitute?
🥃Angostura Bitters Substitute At a Glance
- Is there a kitchen cupboard substitute?: No. There is no common household ingredient that can replicate the molecular intensity of a professional tincture. If you don’t have bottled bitters, a kitchen hack like coffee or tea will likely ruin a spirit-forward drink like an Old Fashioned.
- Any Bitters is a Good Angostura Substitute: If you have a different brand of bitters (like Orange or Peychaud’s), use it. While it won’t be a “true” Angostura Old Fashioned, it will still provide the essential chemical balance (the “backbone”) that a cocktail requires. It will simply be a different, potentially delicious, flavor profile.
- Angostura Flavors: Liquorice, tamarind, dried orange zest, and nutmeg. Angostura’s bitterness is quite pronounced, making the other flavors hard to detect.
- Peychaud’s Flavors: Quite floral, spicy, and sweet profile. The bitter taste is less intense than Angostura, and you will notice the distinct tastes of anise, cherry, and citrus.
- Orange Bitters: Orange Bitters can be used successfully to replace Angostura, but the resultant drink will be more citrusy.
Is Peychaud’s An Angostura Bitters Substitute?
The most well-known brand of bitters, next to Angostura, is Peychaud’s. While bartenders recognize Angostura as the classic bitters for an Old-Fashioned Cocktail, they use Peychaud’s primarily for the famous New Orleans Sazerac, which also features the infamous Absinthe.
🌿 Beyond the Sazerac If you’re using Peychaud’s as a substitute, you’re already halfway to a Sazerac. But do you know why it was traditionally paired with the “Green Fairy”?
Read: Absinthe 101 — The Myths and the Reality
Bright red in color, Peychaud’s is a very old brand of aromatic bitters with a quite floral, spicy, and sweet profile. The bitter taste is less intense than Angostura, and you will notice the distinct tastes of anise, cherry, and citrus. Peychaud’s is another of the few classic bitters to have survived prohibition. Apothecary Antoine Amédée Peychaud, who also invented the Sazerac cocktail, created this elixir in the 1830s.
Like Angostura, Peychaud’s uses gentian, a very bitter root. While the two can be considered interchangeable, they will produce quite noticeable differences. Peychaud’s will make its presence known less for its bitterness and more for its other flavors.
🔬 Why Bother With Bitters? We’ve established that bitters provide the “backbone” of a drink, but how do a few tiny drops actually change the molecular structure of your cocktail?
Read: The Science of Why We Use Bitters in Cocktails
Orange Bitters as an Angostura Bitters Substitute
Orange bitters are another distinct category of bitters made using bitter orange peel (often from Seville oranges) instead of gentian or another bitter root. An old and popular brand is Regan’s Orange Bitters No. 6. You can use Reagan’s or any other orange bitters as a substitute for Angostura or any other bitters brand.
Orange bitters are made with a strong neutral alcoholic spirit and are very concentrated. Warm spices like cardamom, coriander, cloves, allspice, or sometimes anise are usually added to complement the vibrant citrus flavors. Orange bitter notes are meant to dominate, though. To enhance this, bitter roots are sometimes added. Orange bitters can be used very successfully as an Angostura bitters substitute, but again, the flavor will be more citrusy and the aromatic spices will make the cocktail taste different than Angostura.
So, you can use any brand of bottled cocktail bitters as a substitute for Angostura, with varying results. Many classic cocktails call for a certain type of bitters, and substituting will often produce a drink that doesn’t taste the way it was intended. However, you can usually substitute one bitters for another with good results.
Making Your Own Homemade Bitters For Cocktails
However, if you don’t have another brand of bitters, and I’m assuming you do not, the only way to mimic this at home is to make your own homemade bitters. This is something that many people are doing today, as the cocktail or “mixology” revolution is still well underway. There are scores of “artisan” bitters showing up on liquor store shelves, and many bartenders are making their own.
However, to make a homemade version of bitters, you’d need to purchase the bitter ingredient and other herbs and spices, plus the alcohol. If all you wanted was a quick substitute, it would be quicker to run to the liquor store or even the grocery store!
And a lot quicker, at that — it will take you about a month of mostly hands-free waiting to make homemade bitters. The best reasons to make your own is because it’s fun and you can be creative. Plus, you’ll probably enjoy the cocktails you make with your own bitters creation more than any store-bought version.
🍸 Bitters vs. Liqueurs Bitters are “non-beverage” tinctures, but many liqueurs use the same roots and herbs. Learn where the legal and culinary lines are drawn.
Read: What Exactly is a Liqueur?
Adding Bitter Ingredients to Cocktails
Although you won’t get near the bitter flavor of concentrated alcohol bitters, you can use citrus peel, such as lemon or orange, to impart bitter notes to any cocktail, especially those that call for citrus bitters, orange bitters, or lemon bitters.
Keep in mind that you will need to use the peels only, without any of the flesh, unless you also want the sweet or sour flavor of the fruit to come through.
More On Substituting Peychauds For Angostura
The only real substitute for bitters is another kind of bitters! Bitters are not all the same, though. The other ingredients, besides the bitter ingredient, matter as well, and each one will have its own floral, herbal, or spicy undertones. An orange bitters bears no resemblance to a gentian-based bitters.
Although many bartenders may have their own preference, the classic Old Fashioned cocktail tends to be made with Angostura. However, as an Angostura substitute, Peychaud’s is often used, even though they really don’t taste the same because of the aforementioned anise flavor and menthol kick not present in Angostura. Of course, if you make your own drinks, the taste is up to you, and you can use any bitters you would like.
I’ve already written a great deal about Angostura, including whether it actually ever contained any Angostura. Angostura aromatic bitters are by far the most famous bitters in the world, with a fascinating history, and it is one of the few that was around prior to prohibition and managed to survive until after it ended. Other classic cocktails using Angostura include the Manhattan.
Can You Buy Angostura At the Grocery Store?
You may not want to go to a liquor store to purchase Angostura bitters, but before give up on looking for an Angostura bitters substitute, realize that they are very easy to find! Yes, bitters often contain alcohol, which is used to extract the bitter and flavoring elements from the various ingredients, but you can still order them online, or even easier, you can purchase them at the grocery store. Most supermarkets will carry Angostura and perhaps even Peychaud’s or another brand of aromatic bitters. You can also purchase many different kinds of bitters online.
I recently saw a YouTube video in which a person acted out a ‘gotcha’ scenario where an underage fellow discovered that he could purchase bitters at the liquor store without an ID. After learning that Angostura Bitters contain 44.7% alcohol, he purchased an armload of the bottles so that he could make a drink to get drunk on at home. How silly the law is!
Nobody who had ever tried bitters would think you could use them alone to become intoxicated. Since they contain so much bitterness, they are not considered alcoholic beverages but rather “alcoholic non-beverage products.” They are not consumed like a beverage, and since they are so very bitter, there is not much danger that anyone would try to consume them this way.
