Angostura Aromatic Bitters

It should be officially announced as an every household staple. From an Earl Grey tea to all your cocktails, great for anything.

Rating: 19/23 I've never tried to rate bitters before. While there are certainly spirits and other components of cocktails that aren't meant for drinking neat, bitters are on a whole different level. I fully expect my usual rating procedure to break down in this tasting and to need to just give a thumbs up or thumbs down at the end of it. Still. I'll proceed - for the sake of potential comedy, if for nothing else. N: Herbal, bitter, orange peel, bergamot, over-steeped tea, menthol, hints of baking spices, perhaps a bit of licorice. I do smell some alcohol, but I'm quite confident that it won't come through given the quantity being mixed. A drop of water (which in this case, is literally about 50% of the volume of my tasting) brings out more baking spices, with clove and candied ginger being particularly prominent, but cinnamon and possibly allspice also emerging a bit more. It goes from being mostly bitter and austere to a bit sweeter in a way that reminds me of Christmastime (well, Christmas cake, specifically). P: Bergamot, over-steeped tea, menthol, orange peel, candied ginger, baking spices (notably, clove and cinnamon). It's largely the same as the nose, but tasting only a milliliter or so makes that palate rush right on by. Still, there are plenty of good flavors here with a nice balance and complexity. F: Over-steeped tea, clove, and menthol. Numbing. On the long long finish, there's even a bit of mineral. This is the only part that I don't enjoy. The closest thing to drinking neat bitters I've had before this was either absinthe or Fernet Branca, with the latter being the closer of the two. This is much stronger in flavor and far more complex and tasty than Fernet Branca is, with less mint. I wouldn't really want to have this neat (and it isn't recommended anyway), but that's mainly because of the finish. The nose and palate are actually quite enjoyable on their own. The finish isn't bad either, but it's numbing and too bitter/minty for me to be entirely thrilled with it even in a cocktail. At the end of the day, I've put this in numerous cocktails and generally found that it adds a nice bit of complexity to bland (or bland-ish) bitter/fruity cocktails. It's definitely not a 100% success rate, but adding Angostura as close to adding salt to a dish as I've found for mixing a cocktail, so it should be in your bar. Thumbs up. To assign it a numeric rating though, I think it's in the upper teens. This is a very difficult one to rate because I don't have much in the way of bases for comparison. The finish is pretty mediocre, so it's probably in the range of 10 to 13. The nose and palate, however, are quite enjoyable: certainly no lower than 16, and they could be as high as 20. So I'm dealing with wide ranges here and there are two very different ones. I wouldn't say that more than a milliliter or so of this is sippable, but that isn't at all the point. It's a great accent in many mixed drinks and I won't mark it down for not being a miracle ingredient in everything. Considering that I was (shockingly) leaning toward giving (a couple milliliters or less) of it about a 16 neat, it's hard to see this as less than a 17 or 18 for mixing. Really, in pretty much a total ass-pull, I think it's about a 19. I do find that the clove and mint are often a bit too strong, overpowering the other great flavors in here. It doesn't exactly blow my mind either, but it's a fantastic addition to many cocktails.

Wonderful balance of warm spices, citrus, herbal notes, and bitterness.

For mixing only.