Standing behind the bar at Hampden's Le Garage, Patrick Gartner often notices patrons trying to play detective, especially when studying a handful of dark, small bottles.
"A lot of people will pick them up off the bar-top and think it's hot sauce," the bar manager said.
The jars contain spice, but not the kind that adds a kick to chicken wings. They are bitters, a wide-ranging, concentrated and alcoholic liquid ingredient that is in the midst of an explosion in popularity. While many are familiar with centuries-old bitters brands like Peychaud's and Angostura, the trend has expanded in recent years, including a growing number of Baltimore bar programs that are making their own surprising and unexpected flavors.
Often added sparingly by a dropper, bitters serve a "very subtle role," Gartner said, but an important one, especially as the public's taste for bitter flavors expands. In terms of what they add flavor-wise, the name says it all.
"When you're drinking, your bitter tastebuds are way in the back, and they're slightly being activated while everything else —the sweet and the savory and what have you —are going to town," he said.
Bitters trigger those tastebuds, and their addition can bring balance and often elevate the finished product to new heights.
"Bitters will add depth and complexity to a cocktail," Gartner said.
To achieve their flavor, bitters are typically made with, but are not limited to, botanical ingredients like spices, roots, fruit peels and aromatic herbs. Everyone's process is different, and making bitters yourself is about trial and error, Gartner said. Like an aged spirit, these elements rest and fortify in liquid (usually a combination of water and alcohol, the latter of which acts as a solvent for the other ingredients). After a couple of weeks, the intense, flavor-infused liquid is strained and ready for use.
As with making spirits and beer, producing bitters offers a freedom to experiment that many bartenders cherish. We talked to three local bar managers about the public's embrace of bitters, and the fun they're having making their own.
Le Garage (911 W. 36th St., Hampden. legaragebaltimore.com)
The Hampden hotspot bills itself as a "beer bar," but Gartner and his staff take cocktail making just as seriously as what they put on tap. Recent housemade bitters include licorice root, schisandra berry and blood orange. Last Valentine's Day, Gartner said, he made damiana bitters because of their supposed aphrodisiac qualities.
"It gets the blood flowing," he said, before describing the flavor notes as "earthy, woody and lightly floral."
A type of complex bitters that stands on Le Garage's menu is the black walnut leaf and charred cardamom bitters used in the Corpse Reviver Zero cocktail. On a trip to Hampden's Zensations Apothecary, Gartner picked up black walnut leaf based on an employee's enthusiasm for the herb. Intrigued by the leaf's tea flavor, he searched for a companion.
"I was trying a lot of things for the heck of it. I hit a bunch of cardamom with a blowtorch, and now it's one of our staple bitters," Gartner said. "It's rich and floral, but it still has that black-walnut nuttiness to it. It goes really with an Old Fashioned or a Manhattan."
Bar trends come and go, Gartner said, but he predicts patrons' taste for bitters to continue to grow.
"It's not quite a fad, but there will be someone else doing something really cool pretty soon that will attract a lot of attention," he said, "but [bitters] are not going to go anywhere."
Fleet Street Kitchen (1012 Fleet St., Harbor East. fleetstreetkitchen.com)
Tim Riley, beverage director for the Bagby Restaurant Group, remembers when "bitter" was a dirty word.
"For a long time, 'bitter' was a negative thing, and when people encountered it, they were unhappy with it. But now it's become a trendy flavor," Riley said. "The era of sweet drinks that we saw in the '80s — the Sex on the Beaches and things like that — is really long since over."
At Bagby's Fleet Street Kitchen, Riley recently came up with the idea of making caraway bitters to spice up classic cocktails like an Old Fashioned. Not every customer is familiar with caraway, he said.
"When people are confused, I say it's the seeds in rye bread, but it gives that high-toned spice," Riley said. He made the bitters in 100-proof vodka, along with orange peel, herbs and spices.
He partially attributes the rise in bitters to the drinking public's growing love of craft beer, including "quadruple hopped IPAs" and other bitter brews. But more than anything else, Riley said, it was the resurgence in recent years for classic cocktails like the Manhattan and the Sazerac that led to bitters' moment.
"When people started paying attention to old-school drinks, so many of them contain bitters as a crucial and integral component. I think that's what drove where we are now," Riley said. "That orientation around classic drinks has necessitated a wider variety of bitters beyond Angostura."
Alewife (21 N. Eutaw St., downtown. alewifebaltimore.com)
As the bar manager of Alewife, Leila Ghandi had grown tired of pouring uninteresting, sugar-fueled drinks.
"It's better than making some kind of sweet bomb, you know?" Ghandi said, referring to the flavored-vodka-and-energy-drink combination. "Drinks that are super sweet like that just aren't balanced. It's exciting to be able to serve drinks that you know are good. You know they're complex."
Like many other bars, Alewife uses mostly commercial bitters, but Ghandi and her staff utilize housemade floral bitters for the gin-based Crimson Wave cocktail. She described it as "fruity-floral bitters," made with hibiscus, gentian root and lime.
The plan, Ghandi said, is to add more housemade bitters in the future. In fact, she's already in the process of making her own chocolate bitters for her Cracker Jack-inspired, peanut-infused corn whiskey cocktail, There's No Crying in Baseball.
Like Le Garage, Alewife is a bar associated with craft beer, but Ghandi has noticed clientele ordering cocktails, especially the classic gin-based Negroni, much more frequently, even in the past two years. Serving more cocktails means introducing more patrons to the power of bitters, which excites Ghandi.
"Bitters will bring out different nuances and flavors that aren't necessarily there without them," she said. "It's almost like a seasoning. It can take a good cocktail to a great cocktail."