Since adding a POMBAR to Pomegranate Bistro, I have been obsessed with creating craft-style cockatils that incorporate our own house-made bitters, tonics & tinctures – what fun! That’s why I dashed straight from the airport to a IACP Bitters Class taught by barkeep, Sother Teague aka “creative drunk”. The class was held in the East Village at Amor Y Amargo (love & bitterness). Converted from a storage room it was a pop-up bar that permanatly stayed “up” with popularity.
The class was filled with fun facts for bitter’s geeks! Here are some of the tips and nuggets Sother shared with us:
- You don’t add bitters to a cocktail to make it bitter, as you wouldn’t you add salt to your cookie dough to make it salty… same thing
- Vermouth is fortified wine and should be treated as such as its not stable after opening, so buy small bottles & refridgerate after opening.
- TWO catagories of bitters
o Tinctures (think- Angostura, Peychaud’s & Bittermans) – a little dab’ll do ya.
o Potables (think- Campari, Aperol & Fernet-Branca) – less bitter & drinkable on their own. - Bitters are not distilled from anything, nor is any fermentation involved. They are macerated, or steeped.
- 3 components to a bitters recipe: alcohol, a bittering agent, and flavoring agents.
o The most common bittering agents are quinine, orris, gentian, and cinchona.
o The most common flavoring agents are Citrus fruits, with cardamom & cinnamon being popular as well.
Hi Lisa,
I’ve been enjoying yuou posts on the IACPNYC Conference, and thought you might enjoy hearing the back story on what it took to put this monster of a conference together. Below is the blurb and link to the first of a series of posts on our blog Aroma Cucina. Hope you enjoy!
J
A Born Again Blogger!
http://bit.ly/JWqNlb
WE’RE BAAACK!!!!!!! Wanna know where we’ve been? We got sucked into ‘IACPNYC Land’ and the journey was extraordinary! If you’ve seen any of the articles, blogs and reviews of IACP’s Annual Conference held in NYC a little over two weeks ago, you could not possibly have been at least a bit intrigued by the breadth of such a monumental undertaking. And how could you have possibly missed the relentless tweets and the deafening buzz in the social media world? Well, here is just the start of a series of blog posts we will share with our followers that will explain in full-on detail what we’ve been up to, and focusing on the players that made it all happen.
We head back to the mother country days from now, with the great satisfaction of knowing we pulled off a Cecil B. DeMille production on the NYC stage and made IACP a stronger and more relevant organization in the process. For us, it’s always the people you meet and those friendships developed, that allow us to measure our success on a project. We have been thusly rewarded!