Editor note:
Since I wrote this blog post, a commercially available Boker’s Bitters has become available. It is made in Great Britain by a gentleman named Dr. Adam Elmegirab. If you are interested in his site, please check out the link:
Dr. Adam Elmegirab’s Boker’s Bitters
If you are interested in buying a bottle, they are available from Wally’s Wine and Spirits.
The Boker’s bitters are done! They aren’t perfect, but they are the best and only Boker’s bitters I’ve ever made. And I think they are absolutely delicious. My only real qualm is that I couldn’t find any tincture of cochineal (which is the shell of a pregnant little red insect), as our resident witch doctor is in Phoenix for the winter.
A real quick glance at Boker’s bitters: they were one of the most popular cocktail bitters at the turn of the century and a good quantity of Thomas’s recipes call for Boker’s bitters. But prohibition ensured that almost all of the bitter companies went out of business, never to be reconstructed after Repeal Day. The truth is, no one really knows what Boker’s bitters tastes like as there has only been one bottle found in modern day that showed up at the London Bar Show in 2006 and unfortunately, there wasn’t enough to go around.
So I made one of the first cocktails in the book that I earlier had to skip over because I was missing almost all of the ingredients, but now everything is in stock.
The Whiskey Cocktail
2 ounces of whiskey
3 drops of gum syrup
2 dashes of Boker’s bitters
It was really delicious. The Boker’s bitters have a lot of fascinating flavors and a lot of depth. I really like the addition that the cardamom gives the bitters. I have used cardamom before in bitters, but I used too much and it trumped all the other flavor suggestions. Anyhow, here is my tweaked recipe for Boker’s Bitters.
Boker’s Bitters
2 cups 100 proof vodka
(I have used a myriad of different bases — whiskey, rye, vodka, high-proof rum, and ginger vodka) when making bitters and I have found that I can taste no difference once the ingredient has spent so much time in the solution)
.5 ounce of quassia
.5 ounce of catechu
.5 ounce of calamus
Peel from one small orange
5 cardamom pods
I let this compound sit for three weeks, and then I ran it through some cheesecloth. It’s got a very nice balance of flavors with a long slightly astringent finish. The cardamom really adds a lot of depth and an underlying layer of mystery.
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