Bittermens comes to Boston
It’s business as usual at Green Street on a recent Wednesday night. The barflies’ conversation adds up to a clamorous but comforting din, a row of ice-filled martini glasses sits chilling on the bar, soul music plays over the sound system, and the bartenders add their own rhythmic enhancement to the soundtrack with the rattle and jangle of cubes in shakers. Janet and Avery Glasser are perched at the bar when I arrive. She’s working her way through a beer, he’s just about in need of a new drink. When bartender Andy McNees approaches, Avery has a special request: could he please make a Manhattan and split it into two small glasses? “Sure,” says Andy, affable as always. Avery then instructs McNees to add a few dashes of Angostura to one and a few dashes of Bittermens’ Xocolatl Mole Bitters to the other.
The Glassers, a husbandandwife team, make Bittermens themselves with formulas they derived through many rounds of trial and error. They use meticulously chosen roots, barks, spices, peels, and herbs, daunting amounts of neutral grain spirit, and a collection of vats, jars, and jugs in their kitchen. That’s how they did it when they lived in San Francisco; when they moved to Manhattan in 2007, they turned their closet-sized kitchen into a lab. Since April, they’ve called Brookline home, so that’s where the bitters are presently formulated — to the delight of the select bartenders who are lucky enough to have them behind their bar. (At press time, Eastern Standard, No. 9 Park, and Green Street were the only spots selected to carry them.) Bittermens, which the Glassers make in six exotic flavors (plus a few top-secret custom batches) aren’t yet commercially available, which is to say they can’t be sold for legal tender. (More on that later.) So for now, consider a few dashes your bartender’s gift to you.
And gifts they are indeed. The flavors concentrated in the tiny cobalt-blue bottles have the power to take a familiar drink and imbue it with surprising dimension. This becomes remarkably clear when I taste the two Manhattans side by side. Compared with the standard Manhattan, the sample with a few dashes of Xocolatl doesn’t so much have a chocolate flavor as an echo of chocolate. The bitters round out the cocktail’s other components with a hint of zesty cocoa, underscoring herbal and spicy elements in the vermouth and rye whiskey, respectively. Experiencing the difference reminds me of that moment when Dorothy emerges in Oz and objects and faces that are readily familiar come to new life in Technicolor. The Glassers, who both sport tattoos and glasses that make you wonder if they also own an art gallery, have another way of explaining it.
“It’s like making an extract, just like bakers have peppermint, vanilla, and lemon extract,” Avery says. “You throw that into a cake and it completely changes the nature of the cake.”
His analogies to cooking are legion. The Squirrel Nut Bitters, he says, started out as a joke, an off-the-cuff idea inspired by a drink made by noted bartender Brian Miller at New York’s Death & Co. The base was pecan-infused bourbon.
“We wondered if you could use the same concept to make a bitter,” Avery recalls. “Sometimes you just want to have a sense of the nut, not have the nut overpowering as the primary flavor. It’s just like in cooking: if you want lots basil flavor, you use pesto. If you want a hint of basil, throw some chopped on top.”
Bitters, let’s not forget, are the ingredient that historically defined a cocktail, thereby differentiating it from a plain old mixed drink. Before the word “cocktail” came into play just over 200 years ago, folks in tri-corn hats mixed spirits, fruits, and fizz in various proportions to make drinks — be it a highball, a punch, a sling, a cobbler, or a sour. They weren’t technically a cocktail until bitters — a catch-all term for concentrated infusions of herbs, spices, roots, barks, and alcohol, traditionally used for medicinal purposes — came into the picture. Today there are various mass-produced bitters, Angostura being the most common. But as the classic-cocktail renaissance surges, a growing number of bartenders are eager to get their hands on and experiment with boutique brands, if not make their own.
Tom Schlesinger-Guidelli, assistant bar manager at Eastern Standard, recently began steeping and soaking herbs and roots in-house to create his own bitters. He can attest that finding the perfect balance for new flavors can be like attempting a round of badminton on a blustery tundra. But there are other reasons he’s excited to tinker with Bittermens.
“These offer something I’ve never had to play with before. The Xocolatl is spectacular — there are such distinct spices,” he says, unpacking a brown paper bag stuffed with sacks of quassia chips, dried orange peels, gentian root, wild-cherry bark, and other ingredients he’s used in his experiments. Another one of the Glassers’ popular styles is the Elemakule Tiki Bitters, laced with West Indian flavors that are characteristic of classic Polynesian drinks, like clove, nutmeg, and all-spice. “I think their Tiki Bitters could revitalize the tiki movement,” Schlesinger-Guidelli notes.
The Xocolatl bitters remain the signature of the Bittermens line, which the Glassers have been making since late 2006 in San Francisco. Longtime cocktail aficionados, a trip to the local Gin 209 distillery triggered a revelation: something was missing in the cocktail world. They’d sampled several experimental batches made by others, but most were riffs on an already existing tune. They wanted to compose a new song. Thus, the spicy Xocolatl.
The pair had no plan, no sales pitch. They were simply curious to find out whether their concoction was any good. So they took it to Bacar, one of their local haunts in San Francisco, and asked the bartender to tinker with it in a few rounds. It was validation and then some. Not only did it work with tequila, going boldly where no bitters had gone before (read: into a margarita), it also played well with spirits that know bitters well. “[The bartender] made a Manhattan and it just tasted like Christmas,” Janet remembers.
Of the six varieties in their line, one was the consequence of a “happy accident” (a batch of Mole with too much cacao became the recipe for Sweet Chocolate Bitters). The rest resulted from conversations with elite bartenders, especially once they moved to Manhattan and became mired in the mixology scene. In keeping with what was becoming tradition, when they settled in Boston, they designed a bitters as a token of thanks to the bartenders who welcomed them here. The Boston Bittahs, as they’re called, pack a mighty punch of citrus with slight hints of chamomile and basil, and tastes as strong as summer feels after a New England winter.
“That one is really representative of what that couple can do,” Schlesinger-Guidelli says of Boston Bittahs. He, for the record, was the first bartender to get his hands on a bottle and experiment. A favorite composition to date involves Yellow Chartreuse, Plymouth gin, Lillet Blanc, St. Germain, and Boston Bittahs. “I’ve had success with that one. Those citrus notes, when they hit Chartreuse, there’s a perfumed, almost violet flavor. It reminds me of a perfume that my mother used to wear,” he muses.
As of now, the Glassers are still awaiting approval on their recipes from the Alcohol and Tobacco Trade and Taxation Bureau. They’re filing to have their bitters classified as non-potable (as opposed to potable varieties, like Campari and Averna). The TTB, which handles all things containing alcohol, is split into various departments: one handles distilled spirits, another handles beer, another wine, and still another handles everything else. That includes, among other items, vanilla extract, mouthwash, and ethanol. If you’re a small producer making bitters and you’ve submitted an application for government approval, it likely ends up in a pile with applications submitted by McCormick and Proctor & Gamble. Guess whose will be looked at first?
Until they get the bureaucratic green light, the Glassers can only give their bitters out to bars. All they want in return is feedback, which hasn’t been tough to solicit.
“It gives bartenders the option to change things subtly without changing an entire recipe,” says Avery.
Or, as Schlesinger-Guidelli puts it, uncapping a little blue bottle of Boston Bittahs and taking a deep breath, “This is just fucking fun. Think of how cool that is: this is the first batch, the first bottle.”
