Bittermens
Brooklyn craft bitters house founded 2007 by Avery and Janet Glasser. Made their reputation with Xocolatl Mole Bitters—a chocolate-chile bitters that became an instant standard for mezcal and rum-forward modern cocktails. The fullest experimental range in American craft bitters.
Bittermens started in 2007 when Avery Glasser, a longtime cocktail enthusiast and chemist, decided to bottle the Xocolatl Mole Bitters he had been making in his kitchen for years. The bitters—a chocolate-and-chile-forward aromatic with cinnamon, allspice, and dried fruit—turned out to be exactly what bartenders working with mezcal, aged rum, and tequila had been missing. Within five years, Xocolatl Mole was on the back bar of every serious cocktail program in the country. The line has expanded since to roughly a dozen bitters, each with a focused purpose.
For exotic cocktails, the relevant Bittermens entries are Bittermens ’Elemakule Tiki Bitters (also called Tiki Bitters)—an allspice-and-cinnamon-forward aromatic designed specifically for tiki and exotic cocktails, very useful in Mai Tai variants, Jet Pilot reconstructions, and any drink where the maker wants a Don’s Mix-style spice note in dash form. Bittermens Hopped Grapefruit Bitters is the modern revival’s answer for grapefruit-forward drinks like the Brown Derby and certain Hemingway Daiquiri reconstructions. Bittermens Xocolatl Mole itself works beautifully in rum Old Fashioneds and Jamaican-rum cocktails where the chocolate note picks up the funk.
The Bittermens lineup also includes Boston Bittahs (chamomile-citrus), Burlesque Bitters (hibiscus-pomegranate), and Orchard Street Celery Shrub—each with a specific cocktail application. For the home bar that wants to go beyond Angostura and Peychaud’s, Bittermens is where the experimental bottlings start.
Buy: Amazon for the standard SKUs; Astor Wines for the full catalog; direct at bittermens.com for limited bottlings.