Angostura Bitters: Breaking Away

It’s taken nearly two centuries, but Angostura bitters has finally secured a beachhead in the United States.

Actually, two of them.

This week Trinidad-based CL Financial —- which acquired Angostura from spirits giant Pernod Ricard earlier this year — bought Lawrenceburg Distillers in Indiana and the Charles W. Medley distillery in Owensboro, Kentucky, in two independent transactions. That’s a lot of acquisition for a company whose flagship product is a four-ounce bottle containing a product that’s rarely served more than three drops at a time.

Angostura began in 1824 as an elixir to quell grumbling guts. It was made of various herbs, barks, and roots steeped in rum, and was invented by the German adventurer Dr. Johann Gottlieb Benjamin Siegert, who served as the surgeon general to Simon Bolivar at a town called Angostura on Venezuela’s Orinoco River. (It’s now Ciudad Bolivar.)

Siegert made lots of infusions, but the one that caught on was called "amargo aromatico," or aromatic bitters. After the Bolivarian wars, Siegert remained in Angostura and continued to sell his bitters. Customers appreciated them not only for their relief of gastric distress, but because they made alcoholic drinks taste much better.

Siegert’s bitters operation relocated to Trinidad some years later, and has since been bought and sold several times. (Bacardi owned it for a while.) The Angostura plant in Trinidad now produces not just bitters but lots of rum — they make their own 1919 brand rum, produce 10 Cane for Moet-Hennessey, and distill many other rums sold regionally — but under the new owners, have aspirations globally. And a good place to start seemed Kentucky bourbon, which is in great demand now in Europe and Asia.

The Lawrenceburg distillery is the largest in the country, producing nearly one out of ten bottles of spirits consumed domestically (much of it for Seagram). The plant will also serve as the U.S. headquarters for Angostura. It’s unknown if they’ll start producing their own rum here. But they do plan to shift some bottling of their bitters to Indiana.

Will Angostura bitters be made in the U.S.? I hope not. The ingredients in this fine and complex bitters are guarded as closely as Coca-Cola’s formula, and the plant in Trinidad has top-secret locked rooms, mysterious chutes to convey ingredients from place to another unwitnessed, and a convoluted supply chain to ensure no one can track what herbs and barks enter the plant.

All this mystery sure makes it taste better. I’m pretty sure Indiana Aromatic Bitters just wouldn’t taste the same.