Spice up cold-weather cocktails with Basement Bitters

By Drew Prindle Published December 22, 2019

If you’ve been sipping the same seasonal spirits year after year, it’s high time you spice things up with a good bitters.

For those of you who might be unfamiliar, here’s a quick rundown. Bitters is basically a type of alcohol-based flavoring infused with an array of different botanical ingredients to give it a bitter/bittersweet flavor – hence the name. These mixtures have been around for centuries, and while the recipe differs from brand to brand, most of the well-known and widely available brands generally use aromatic plant extracts like cinchona bark (quinine), gentian root, wormwood, and angostura bark.

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As a rule, they’re extremely strong in flavor. Just a couple drops of warm, spicy, astringent-y bitters can transform a plain-Jane cocktail into something extraordinary, balancing its flavors and adding new dimension and depth. They’re a must-have for any well-stocked home bar.

Bitters from longstanding brands like Angostura or Peychaud’s have been around for centuries, but lately we’ve been enamored with a new elixir from Basement Bitters called Bitter Frost. It’s a special blend of unaged rye spirit, Sarsaparilla, and fourteen other herbs and spices, which are then balanced with maple syrup and aged in cured rye whiskey barrels. The result is a distinctively aromatic bitters that’s crisp, bitter, warm, and completely different than any other you’ll try.

You can pick up a bottle in Basement Bitters’ online store for $20 bucks.

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