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Bartender’s Choice - The Bitter Truth
A DASH ofSomething WORTH CELEBRTING
THE BITTER TRUTH BARTENDERS UNFOLD A LIFELONG MYSTERY
By Michael Tulipan
It’s a tale worthy of Steven Spielberg—the quest for a longlost relic and a reverse engineered recipe brought back to life. For their latest release, German bartenders Stephan Berg and Alexander Hauck, co-founders of The Bitter Truth, took inspiration from the very first book about cocktails, Jerry Thomas’s seminal, The Bartender’s Guide: How to Mix Drinks: A Bon-Vivant’s Companion, which highlighted an elusive bitters brand long thought lost to history.
Thomas references a brand called “Bogart’s Bitters” in several recipes, but at the time, no such brand existed. Instead, it is assumed an error in the editorial process led to the use of Bogart’s instead of Boker’s Bitters, then a leading brand originally created by Johann Boker in Germany in 1828.
Berg and Hauck have made bitters something of their lives’ work and launched The Bitter Truth when they were still hard to find in Europe. The pair had already been producing handmade cocktail bitters at bars where they were working. Stephan also owned a large collection of historical bitters, some of which hadn’t been produced for decades. Launching a company was the natural next step. It’s hard to imagine recreating bitters from more than a century ago from a recipe that’s been lost to history, but they set out to do just that. “We were looking for Boker’s Bitters in auctions and yard sales for many years only to come back empty-handed,” say Berg and Hauck. “Very few people had ever heard of it. It was a mystery.”
Finally, they discovered an original Boker’s bottle at auction, which led to a painstaking recreation of the recipe, a process lasting more than ten years that the pair believes resulted in “a flavor profile so unique, like nothing else of our times.” They also decided to recreate Boker’s distinctive “lady leg” long-necked brown glass for the release.
Modern cocktails rely on bitters for complexity and depth of flavor, and Bogart’s Bitters provides this and much more. “The complexity is unmatched and just a few dashes will transform your average cocktail into something worth celebrating,” say Berg and Hauck. “The herbs and spices form a very specific aromatic flavor profile. It makes the cocktail jump all over your mouth.”
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