Bitters

From the apothecary

Bitters began as cures. European monks, responsible for treating illness long before medicine was a formal field, built remedies from herbs, roots, barks, flowers and spices, potions effective enough to survive centuries.

When apothecaries inherited the job, someone mixed bitters into liquor to make the medicine easier to swallow and discovered it worked the other way too: the bitters took the bite out of the booze and pulled its better qualities forward.

The two originals

Fittingly, both stalwarts came from medicine men. Angostura contains more than forty ingredients, and the recipe is known to only five people at a time, who take it seriously enough that they've agreed never to fly together, since a single crash would erase the formula.

Peychaud sold his around New Orleans, and when the Merchant's Exchange House combined them with Cognac and absinthe, the resulting Sazerac was popular enough to be bottled and sold nationally by the 1890s.

How to use them

Think of bitters the way you think of salt in cooking. A few dashes won't make a drink taste bitter. They pull everything else into focus and stop the whole thing sitting flat.

Add them slowly. You can always put another dash in, and there is no taking one back out.

Once the basics feel steady, the category is worth wandering around in. It has grown from two hometown names into hundreds of small-batch tinctures: celery, cardamom, chocolate, grapefruit, and stranger things than those.