The Bitter Truth Bogarts Bitters

The Bitter Truth is the German bitters house run by Stephan Berg and Alexander Hauck out of Pullach, just south of Munich, and Bogart's Bitters is its most ambitious revival. Bogart's is the first bitters named in the first cocktail book ever published, Jerry Thomas's 1862 bartender's guide, and the first printed Martini recipe in 1888 called for genuine Bogart's, a sign that imitations were already circulating; the name itself is generally taken to be a misspelling of Boker's. No bottle from Thomas's era survives, but The Bitter Truth owns one of the few known originals still holding liquid, bottled around 1900, and spent about ten years analyzing the formula and correcting for what a century in glass does to flavor. The result is bottled at 42.1% ABV in a 375ml reproduction of the brown lady-leg bottle the original came in, with a label redrawn from the surviving one, no added sugar and no preservatives. The brand describes it as dark spice, chocolatey coffee and European herbs, deliberately not cardamom-led, and it is meant for the drinks Thomas built around it: a Japanese Cocktail, a Brandy Crusta, an East India, or a Manhattan that wants more depth than Angostura gives.

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