Peychaud’s Aromatic Cocktail Bitters

Our original combination of cacao, cinnamon & spice. We recommend adding a dash to libations made with dark rum, aged tequila and any other dark spirits you may encounter.

Inspired by the classic Mole sauces of Mexico, this bitter was originally designed to pair with aged tequila, but we have found that it works beautifully with aged rum, bourbon and rye as well. We’re big fans of putting a dash in an Old Fashioned or Manhattan, and new classics like The Conference or the Latin Quarter just wouldn’t be the same without them.

Primary Flavors: Chocolate, Cinnamon, Spices

We love spicy foods here at Bittermens. In fact, habaneros appear in everything from cream sauces to omelets at home. However, we have found that when people try to make spicy cocktails, much of the time the flavor falls short.

The problem as we see it isn’t the heat – it’s how the heat is incorporated into the cocktail. Infusing jalapeño peppers into tequila is perfect if you want a tequila drink. However, simply putting commercial hot sauces, sambal or sriracha into a cocktail usually throws off the cocktail’s balance.

The way that most hot sauces are made is by blending peppers with vinegar, salt and other spices. Vinegar, eh? That sure sounds like a shrub to us. Shrubs are classically refreshing fruit and vinegar-based syrups that were sweetened and diluted to make a beverage since revolutionary times. Instead of making a berry shrub or an orange shrub, why not make a hot pepper shrub?

We’ve fortified the shrub with alcohol (to better extract the flavors from the spices) and made it much more concentrated, so you only need to use drops instead of ounces to get the desired effect… which, in this case, is a good ol’ bit of heat.

We love gingerbread. Well, to be specific, we love the the sort of ginger cookies that we used to get at the Christmas markets in cities throughout Germany and Northern Europe. In Norway, these ginger cookies were called pepperkaker… or pepper cakes.

Of course, nothing can beat having access to fresh ginger juice when you’re making a cocktail – but it isn’t something that most people have laying around their kitchen, and if you do make ginger juice, it starts to lose its flavor almost immediately. By using a combination of dried gingers and alcohol, we’ve been able to create a shelf-stable ginger bitter that can bring that bite to warming winter cocktails – especially those made with rum and bourbon – yet also work beautifully in classic bucks and mules. In fact, 10 drops in a Moscow Mule turns it into something special.

Back in 2011, we added these bitters into our experimental series as the Peppercake Bitters, but stopped making them a couple of years later. We’ve tweaked the bitters to make them a little gingersnappier, and are bringing them back as our Buckspice Gingersnap Bitters.