BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

In Food And Drink, Americans No Longer Need A Spoonful Of Sugar To Make The Bitter Medicine Go Down

Tara Nurin
This article is more than 7 years old.

Not too many interviews start out with the VP of U.S. marketing for a 156-year-old spirits company saying, “It had its heyday in America in the 1970s. If your parents ever went to a key party this is what they drank.

Notwithstanding the fact that this writer’s parents most certainly wouldn’t recognize a key party if it rear-ended them, the image of 70s-era suburbanites sipping dark red Campari while they picked keys out of a bowl to determine who among their neighbors they would bed that night was a stirring one.

The executive continued.

“It was exotic, different, and very, very chic.”

The herbal Italian liqueur was also – as now – very, very, very bitter, a fact that, despite its sustained popularity in Europe, kept its reach from growing outside certain –ahem -- cultured U.S. circles. For decades, U.S. sales of the aperitif stagnated around 50,000 cases per year. Then around five years ago, the brand’s sales started climbing and eclipsed 100,000 cases last year. It had encountered, as the executive says, a perfect storm.

“Bartenders started experimenting more with cocktails and revisiting classic cocktails,” says the exec, whose name is Dave Karraker. “Cocktails got more interesting so they were looking for more interesting flavors. They came across the Negroni, invented in 1919 in Florence (and made with Campari, gin and vermouth), which is one of these pillars of the cocktail pantheon.”

They discovered more classic cocktails, too, many of which contained other herb, root or bark-based liqueurs, AKA potable bitters, that can be drunk on their own, and tincture bitters, generally made with just alcohol, water, and botanical extracts and used by the drop rather than the ounce.

At the same time, he says, America’s palate was evolving. Starbucks had introduced the middle class to gourmet coffee, doctors were touting the benefits of dark chocolate and craft brewers had launched a full assault on the palate by competing with one another to reach the highest imaginable realms of hop bitterness in their India Pale Ales (IPAs).

After more three centuries sharing a collective identity, Americans were finally loosening the death grip sugary flavors had held on their tongues.

“It was the food revolution that had a lot to do with Americans falling in love with these bold flavors,” says Dale DeGroff, considered the father of the modern cocktail movement for his role in championing quality cocktails as head bartender at The Rainbow Room in the 1980s and 90s.

All you have to do is think of the ubiquity of kale, a bitter green that Karraker says is growing more by weight than any vegetable in the U.S., to realize a bitter revolution is upon us.

“It’s been a very good year,” says DeGroff, who released his own global brand of spiced bitters in 2012 to replace flavors that were lost to this country during a very low period for cocktails in the 70s and 80s. He calls it Pimento Aromatic Bitters and it’s the only packaged product he puts his name on.

“There are so many commercial brands (of bitters) now. When I was tending bar there were three: Fee Brothers, Peychaud’s and Angostura,” he says. “They’re intended to be a foil against sweetness.”

Bitterness isn’t a taste humans necessarily take to naturally. Studies have shown countless babies twisting their faces in displeasure when eating a bitter food and Leslie Stein at the Monell Chemical Sciences Center in Philadelphia says kids tend to more strongly dislike bitter flavors than their parents. It’s believed that the sense of a bitter taste emerged from the need to warn early humans of danger or potential toxicity in the plants they might try to eat. Stein says most bitter-tasting chemical compounds have “some degree of pharmacological activity and hence, potential toxicity.”

It’s so important to human function that 25 different types of taste receptors can detect bitter compounds while one or two detect sweetness and another one or two detect salt. But whether or not we like those flavors is determined by genes, age and experience.

“Our genes help to determine how we detect the basic tastes by influencing the configuration of taste receptors. Part of why you might like broccoli -- or quinine -- while your best friend finds it bitter is because you have different genes that in turn code for different bitter receptors,” emails Stein. “It makes sense that kids find bitter stronger because they need to learn what is safe to eat and can't afford to make a mistake.”

Though bartenders through the centuries have served many a bitter aperitif, believing that the perceived toxicity in bitter substances triggers the body to salivate and stimulate rapid digestion, Stein says she can’t find evidence of a scientific link. What is definitely true is that we can grow to like a flavor through repeated exposure, which we may subject ourselves to if we know the food or drink has pharmacological effects, like alcohol or coffee.

But this person-by-person sensory conversion didn’t necessarily happen quickly enough for late 18th century doctors, who basically invented modern bitters when they began disguising the bitterness in their botanical medicines with alcohol, colorings and sweeteners. Bitters remained a foundational element in mixed drinks as they came to be called cocktails in the early 19th century. Because natural ingredients like lemons could be expensive and hard to come by, inventive “mixologists” thought to marinate herbs in alcohol as a poor man’s alternative to fresh produce, and they sometimes gained a marketing advantage by boasting about the diuretic benefits.

But as DeGroff says, “Very few of them made it to the other side of Prohibition.”

Now, with bartenders drawing deeply from history for inspiration, they’re rekindling those pre-Prohibition tastes for complex, unusual and sometimes unpleasant flavors and finding ways to make them enjoyable to a 21st century palate. Yet despite a greater acceptance of bitter and spicy flavors (you can thank globalism and immigration for the last one), it can still be a hard sell.

Campari launched Negroni Week as a promotional world-wide charity event in 2013 (this year’s runs through Sunday), and DeGroff has actually written and performed a one-man show in 40 markets to edutain drinkers about bitters. He coaches young bartenders to serve Campari on the rocks instead of straight up so the drink reveals less, rather than more, bitterness as it sits, and he credits the entry of Aperol into the United States for giving his protégés a less bitter aperitif to work with than Campari and some of its competitors.

But American cocktail drinkers are coming along, in some ways following the lead of “hop-heads” in the craft beer movement, who may have already hit peak bitterness season and are sauntering down the other side of the mountain. American craft beer actually invented itself in the late 1970s and 80s (some might argue the mid-60s) by brewing the country’s first hoppy English-style pale ales since before Prohibition. In 1996 Stone Brewing opened in San Diego with a pale ale then went on in 2002 to brew Ruination IPA, which helped pioneer the West Coast IPA style, known for the intense hop bitterness that has partially defined the craft beer movement for the past 10 to 15 years.

Stone describes Ruination, the first “full-time brewed and bottled West Coast double IPA,” as “massively hopped and aggressively bitter, it helped spark the ever-growing desire among legions of craft beer fans for over-the-top hop flavors and aromas.” It measures in at more than 100 International Bitterness Units even though it’s believed the human tongue can only detect 100 IBUs.

But something happened on the way to 2015, when Stone revamped its Pale Ale and Ruination recipes to reflect a growing desire to actually taste the range of tropical, citrusy, piney, earthy and floral flavors available in hops instead of just bragging about losing a fight with their bitterness. Brewmaster Mitch Steele says sales were slowing and fans and sales reps were starting to talk about beers being brewed with new, more delicate varieties of hops. Stone, ever an industry leader, needed to get in front of the trend.

“When we (first) started brewing these beers that had this high level of bitterness our goal was to teach people how to like these beers. We weren’t too worried about the people who didn’t get it, and it’s worked for us,” he says. “But the extreme beer thing sort of ran its course. People are getting back into wanting some balance.”

Sales of Ruination have increased by 100% since reformulating the recipe.

But there’s no denying that despite its growing acceptance among mainstream craft beer and cocktail drinkers, bitterness does still remain an acquired taste, one that may cause devotees to credit themselves for their discerning and sophisticated palates.

“Loving bitter is a badge of honor,” says Karraker. “There’s a wink and a nod, almost like a handshake.”

Or, you could say, almost like owning the key to a daringly exclusive party.