A glass jar of deep amber liquid with roots and barks steeping inside, beside small piles of dried gentian root, orange peel curls, cinnamon sticks, cardamom pods and cloves on a dark wood workbench

How Cocktail Bitters Are Made

September 30, 2026

The smallest bottle on a bar cart does the most concentrated work in the house. Everything behind that happens weeks before the bottle is opened, as roots, barks, peels and spices steep in strong alcohol until the liquid has taken what they have to give. The method is maceration, the same basic approach behind the formula an army surgeon in Venezuela perfected in 1824. This piece follows it from dried botanical to dasher bottle. The complete cocktail bitters guide covers what to do with the finished bottle, and the article on how bitters went from medicine to cocktail covers how a stomach tonic became the bartender's spice rack.

Legally, not a drink

Start with the strangest fact about bitters, because it explains the whole design. In the United States, cocktail bitters can be formulated as what the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau calls a nonbeverage product. The maker files the recipe on TTB Form 5154.1, Formula and Process for Nonbeverage Product, and the bureau's chemists evaluate whether the result is, in the regulatory phrase, unfit for beverage purposes. That is not an insult. It marks bitters as a seasoning rather than a drink. A product that qualifies lets its maker claim drawback of all but one dollar per proof gallon of the federal excise tax paid on the spirit inside. The same program covers flavoring extracts, medicines and perfume, which is the company bitters keep in the eyes of the law. Every later step in the process serves that identity, a concentrate strong enough to be dosed by the dash.

Two jobs, one jar

Every bitters recipe divides into two parts. The first is the bitter backbone. It comes from a short list of plants that specialize in bitterness: gentian root above all, with cinchona bark, quassia and wormwood doing the same job in other recipes. Yellow gentian is a mountain plant. Its roots are the main ingredient of a bitter liqueur widely drunk in northern and central Italy and the Alpine regions of France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Slovenia, and harvesting them for extraction means collecting roots from plants at least five years old. The root's bitterness comes from secoiridoid glycosides, chiefly gentiopicroside and amarogentin. Amarogentin has a measured bitterness index of about 58 million, which means it still registers as bitter diluted to roughly one part in 58 million. Gentian is the one botanical named on the US ingredient label of Angostura aromatic bitters.

The second part is the aromatic wardrobe: cinnamon and cassia, clove, cardamom, dried citrus peel, cherry bark, lavender, cacao, hops and chile. Cinnamon, clove and cardamom are kitchen spices first. The single-origin spices guide explains why origin and freshness shape a spice's flavor, and the article on how spices are harvested follows cinnamon and pepper from the plant. What changes is what the bitters maker does with them next. The table below maps seven botanicals to their role and to a bottle built on each one.

Botanical	What it is	What it does in the jar	A bottle built on it
Gentian root	Dried mountain root	The bitter floor; slow to extract, long on the palate	Angostura Aromatic (shop Angostura Aromatic)
Bitter orange peel	Dried citrus peel	Bright, bittersweet peel oils that extract quickly	Regan's Orange No. 6 (shop Regan's Orange No. 6); Fee Brothers West Indian Orange (shop Fee Brothers West Indian Orange)
Cherry bark	Dried tree bark	Dark, fruity depth under the spice	Bittercube Cherry Bark Vanilla (shop Bittercube Cherry Bark Vanilla)
Clove	Dried flower bud	Warm spice that carries far in tiny doses	Dashfire Clove (shop Dashfire Clove)
Cacao	Fermented, roasted seed	Roasted depth and a dry cocoa finish	Bittermens Xocolatl Mole (shop Bittermens Xocolatl Mole)
Lavender	Dried flower	A floral top note; gives up its character in days	Scrappy's Lavender (shop Scrappy's Lavender)
Hops	Dried cone flower	Green, resinous aroma over the bitter base	Bittermens Hopped Grapefruit (shop Bittermens Hopped Grapefruit)

Maceration, the long middle

The core of the process is a lidded jar and a long wait. Maceration means steeping botanicals in strong spirit at room temperature, and the spirit is doing real chemistry. Alcohol dissolves both the bitter compounds locked in roots and barks and the volatile oils that carry aroma, and those oils are what water alone handles poorly. The jar starts strong, and the strength comes down later. At the top of the scale, Angostura's process as described by the World Intellectual Property Organization mixes the ingredients to a proprietary formula, crushes and filters them, and infuses them in vats of 97 percent alcohol. As few as five company directors are allowed into the room where the ingredients are mixed.

There are two ways to run it. The first puts everything in one vessel on one clock. The second is the perfumer's method: each botanical macerates alone as a single tincture on its own schedule, and the finished tinctures are blended to a recipe. That gives the maker control over ingredients that extract at very different speeds. Either way, timing follows the tissue. Flowers, leaves and citrus peels give up their character in days, while roots, barks and seeds release theirs slowly and can steep for weeks.

Brad Thomas Parsons documented the craft revival in his book Bitters (shop Bitters by Brad Thomas Parsons). His apple bitters recipe macerates for two weeks with a daily shake. The strained solids are then simmered in water and steeped again, so the batch captures what alcohol alone leaves behind. Bittercube, founded in the fall of 2009 by two bartenders who moved to Milwaukee to start it, says it uses only raw botanicals rather than extracts or flavorings, and that whiskey, rum and brandy, the base of most of its bitters, add complexity and depth. None of it is distillation. The calendar is the machine.

Straining, rounding, resting

When extraction is done, the jar is strained, and the liquid is filtered, more than once if needed, until the sediment is gone. The Parsons recipe then rounds the result before bottling. Water from the solids steep brings the strength down, and rich syrup softens the attack. Angostura's US label lists caramel color among its ingredients. Then the blend rests again, for three days in the Parsons recipe.

The bottle and the dash

The finished concentrate goes into small bottles behind a dasher, the narrow fitment that meters out liquid a shake at a time. That piece of hardware is the dosing system, built for dashes rather than ounces. The process scales down to a kitchen. A couple of quart jars, cheesecloth, a funnel, a saucepan and a dasher bottle (shop the Cocktail Kingdom bitters bottle) cover a home batch, and the Parsons book prints the recipes. The home bar guide covers where the finished bottle fits among the rest of the tools.

The houses, old and new

The oldest name in the category traces back to that army surgeon. Johann Gottlieb Benjamin Siegert, a surgeon with Simón Bolívar's forces, had perfected the formula he called Amargo Aromatico, a medical elixir, in the Venezuelan river town of Angostura by 1824. By 1875 his sons had moved the business to Trinidad. The bitters are still produced in Trinidad and Tobago and bottled at 44.7 percent alcohol, and according to the company's account to WIPO, the formula has not changed since 1824. The Angostura aromatic bitters guide tells the full story.

New Orleans supplies the other founding house. Antoine Amédée Peychaud, an apothecary in the French Quarter, began producing his bitters in the 1830s. In 1857 his bitters were advertised as being "put into use in the Sazerac House." The bulk of Peychaud's (shop Peychaud's) is now produced at Sazerac's Buffalo Trace Distillery in Kentucky. Small batches are also made and bottled at the Sazerac House in New Orleans, where visitors can watch the team produce the bitters and explain the botanicals in the recipe.

Between those two houses and the present lies a long thinning-out and a fast revival. By the late twentieth century only a handful of commercial bitters survived. Fee Brothers in Rochester, New York kept an American line going. After Prohibition closed its liquor business, the family firm made drink flavorings, and from 1953 it built a catalog of some 80 mixers, cordials and bitters. After 2000 the revival arrived, led by bartenders and small makers such as Bittercube.

What the process explains

Knowing the method changes how a row of small bottles reads. Weeks of maceration build a concentrate, and a concentrate is measured in dashes. The method also explains the labels, and the bitters buying guide shows how to read them. The article on using bitters outside cocktails puts the bottle to work at the stove.