Angostura's story begins on a battlefield: Dr. Johann Gottlieb Benjamin Siegert, a German surgeon who'd tended the wounded at Waterloo, sailed to South America to serve as Surgeon General in Simón Bolívar's revolutionary army, and in 1824, in the Venezuelan town of Angostura (now Ciudad Bolívar), perfected a medicinal tincture from local botanicals to treat his soldiers' stomach ailments. His sons moved production to Trinidad in 1875, where it remains — the exact recipe of more than 40 ingredients is known to only five people, and the botanicals reportedly pass through Trinidadian customs uninspected under a long-standing family agreement. The famously oversized label was a genuine mistake: one brother redesigned the bottle while another redesigned the label without consulting each other, and everyone assumed someone else would fix it before a competition, but a judge praised the packaging and it stuck. Bottled at 44.7% ABV, Aromatic Bitters is the most-used bitters in the world, essential to the Old Fashioned, Manhattan, and countless others. The distillery, built in 1949 originally to supply the bitters, now produces a serious rum portfolio — the 1919, 1824, and 7 Year among others — plus Orange Bitters, Cocoa Bitters, and the Amaro di Angostura, launched in 2014. Considered a Trinidadian national treasure, and a fixture in every bar on earth.

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