Angostura Bitters Shortage Is Over

When you see a couple dozen bottles of Angostura at Fairway, and reasonably priced, you know that recent shortage of the vital cocktail ingredient is finally over.

Angostura Bitters Distributor Contact OTP

I received this message from Mizkan Americas, the new distributor of Angostura Bitters, in response to my recent post on the coming end of the Angostura shortage:

Mizkan Americas is the exclusive distributor of Angostura Bitters in the United States. After a shortage of bitters due to a severe problem with the bottle supply in Trinidad, where bitters is manufactured, Angostura Bitters is in the US! Mizkan Americas has 6 container loads that have landed and are at our US facilities across the country. We began shipping bitters to distributors around the US in March and are working as quickly as possible to get product to all of our valued customers. Orange Bitters, a new Angostura Bitters offering, is also available in the US and will be shipped as ordered.

Angostura Shortage May End Soon, But Orange Bitters Will Have to Wait

In January, Giselle Laronde-West, a spokeswoman for the Angostura bitters company in Trindad (and a former Miss World!) told the press that the shortage of the essential cocktail staple, which has plagued New York since last December, was near an end. I don't know. I still don't see it on the shelves of my local grocery stores or boutique food shops. And bar owners tell me they can't get their hands of any new stock. Recent reports have blamed the whole problem on a dispute with Angostura's bottle maker. The company says a new bottle supplier from China is on board.

Still, there may a light at the end of the tunnel. Hoping to find out something new, I went to the Angostura website. Among the company's many Pollyanna-ish press releases—no releases between Nov. 22 and Jan. 13 (wonder why!), and NO specific mention of the shortage anywhere!—I found a few tidbits of information.

Not Every Bar's Worried About the Angostura Shortage

Not every barkeeper in New York is fretting over the Angostura Bitters shortfall.

Yesterday, the owner of Bamonte's, the age-old Italian restaurant in Williamsburg, was leaning over his bar, reading an article about the shortage in the New York Post, which had just gotten wind of the story.

"You see this?" he asked his longtime bartender. "Bitters shortage."

The bartender, there since 1965, scoffed. "Who cares?" he said. "How much of that stuff do you need? You use a bottle a year, you're lucky." He strode to the center of the bar and plucked up a jumbo Angostura bottle. It didn't look like it was in danger of hitting empty anytime soon.

"What about Old Fashioneds?" asked a barfly. "And Manhattans?"

"Old Fashioned, yeah," said the owner, who remembers decades past when his bar used to be lined with drinkers who would linger for hours, all drinking straight booze and buying rounds for one another. "But Manhattans, people don't like them with bitters. We leave 'em out."

Chances are Champagne Cocktails are none too popular at Bamonte's, either.

One Man's Search for Angostura

As a journalist, products shortages make me suspicious. Sometimes, as with the George Dickel No. 8 Tennessee Whiskey shortage a couple years back, they're real, and you truly can't find the bottle in question. Other times, as with Knob Creek, there's a little hype involved, and the item is not that hard to come by. When I first posted about a potential shortage of one-of-a-kind Angostura, I wondered if New York would truly feel the pinch. If so, I was certain I'd hear about it. Bartenders who are suddenly unable to fill an order for a Manhattan or Old Fashioned are likely to howl about it.

As previously reported by The Guardian back in early November, "Trinidad's House of Angostura has blamed a shortage in ingredients and a financial restructuring. The firm is owned by CL Financial, a Caribbean conglomerate hit by a liquidity crisis, prompting an emergency bailout earlier this year by the government of Trinidad and Tobago. Patrick Sepe, chief executive of the US distributor, Angostura USA, said the production line ran dry in June and was only just getting back on track. "There has been a shortage," said Sepe. "You can't just turn on and off supply of bitters. It's not like producing bottled water – it's a very delicate, intricate process." "

The food blogs picked up on the shortage only this past week with a couple of alarmist posts. So I decided to follow up on the story. I went to local watering hole in Red Hook, where the owner told me he had to go to a friend's bar in Carroll Gardens begging for an extra bottle of Angostura. Was it really that hard to find? "No store between Atlantic Avenue and here has any," he told me.

It set out to investigate. I went to Met Food, Union Market, Stinky NYC, Key Food, Sahadi, Fairway, and several smaller markets. Sure enough, the place on the shelf where Angostura ought to have been was vacant. Store owners—those who knew what Angostura was and what it was used for, that is (outside of the bar world, people don't do a lot of thinking about this product)—seemed surprised they didn't have any, and unaware of any shortage.

OK, so there did actually seem to be a lack of the stuff. I hate not being able to get something I want, so my investigation turned into a mission. Too many cocktail bars in South Brooklyn, I thought. I'll go to some neighborhood where bartenders aren't combing the shelves and buying up the stock. I had to meet a friend for dinner in Morningside Heights, so I aimed for that area. Food Emporium? All out. Garden of Eden? Nertz. I tried about six big markets along Broadway. Then I hit paydirt in a Gristedes around 100th Street! One lonely bottle sitting by intself, all it's brothers having long ago flown the next. I grabbed it and header for checkout.

The girl cashier looked at my only purpose as she scanned it. Twisting up her face into a quizzical expression, she asked, "What's this stuff for?"

If she only knew.

Don't Be Bitter. Buy Bitters.

There are some things in life that don't expect to have to worry about. The sun will rise. Gravity will keep people and objects safely earthbound. The grocery store will start carrying turkeys sometime after Halloween.

In the bar world, one of the accepted sureties of life is the ready availability and unlimited surplus of Angostura bitters. The little bottles with the oversized wrappers that are essential back bar tools can typically be found in almost any supermarket or deli. You don't have to search high and low. It's the Heinz ketchup of cocktail ingredients.

But, now, the unthinkable is happening. The Guardian reports that the world is in the grips of an Angostura shortage. Bars in England are struggling to keep in a steady supply. The website of Angostura's main UK importer, WB Distribution, says the product is completely sold out. According to the paper, "Trinidad's House of Angostura has blamed a shortage in ingredients and a financial restructuring. The firm is owned by CL Financial, a Caribbean conglomerate hit by a liquidity crisis, prompting an emergency bailout earlier this year by the government of Trinidad and Tobago. Patrick Sepe, chief executive of the US distributor, Angostura USA, said the production line ran dry in June and was only just getting back on track. "There has been a shortage," said Sepe. "You can't just turn on and off supply of bitters. It's not like producing bottled water – it's a very delicate, intricate process." "

The Great Recession hits you everywhere, doesn't it?

Some British bars have turned to the German company, The Bitter Truth, as a substitute.

Once owned by the rum firm Bacardi, the House of Angostura was sold in 1997 to CL Financial. "According to Trinidad's Newsday newspaper, CL leveraged Angostura's profits against a series of acquisitions including a deal to buy control of a Jamaican industrial company, Lascelles deMercado. It was reportedly left with a TT$600m (£57m) hole in its balance sheet."

So far, I have not heard of any bars in New York complaining about the shortage, but I will be asking around.

They Sell No Bitters Before Their Time

At this year's Tales of the Cocktail convention, one of the greatest stirs was about the presence of a new Angostura product on the premises. The bitters company, which has surfed through the decades on the strength of one fantastic, one-of-kind item, was ready to roll out its new orange bitters. And if you could find the p.r. rep, she might pull a bottle out of her big black bag and give you one.

I found her, and got her last bottle. I couldn't have been happier if I had been Little Jack Horner pulling a plum out of my Christmas pie. It's a great orange bitters of enormous depth, very likely the best on the market.

It took something close to forever to pin down the bitters' inventor, Peter Traboulay, for an interview, and a few days more to decipher his accent upon transcribing our conversation, but I got it done. Here's the story, just now published on Saveur.com:

After 184 Years, Angostura Visits the Orange Grove

by Robert Simonson

Plenty of snacks and drinks—Snapple, Doritos; take your pick—are wolfed down because they come in so many different flavors. And their parent companies can't stop themselves from rolling out a new product, a new twist on the old formula, every few months or so. Why have one flavor when you can give the people 23?

But there are other companies that are content to innovate at a slower pace. Take Angostura: back in 1824, Dr. Johann Siegert, a German expatriate living in revolution-torn Venezuela, put together a potent mix of herbs and spices he called "amargo aromatico" and used it to provide relief to soldiers suffering from fever and other ailments. Folks found that it hit the spot, in more ways than one. The world over has since come to know the small bottle with the oversize, densely worded label as an indispensable tool in the building of many cocktails.

And that was that: on one, singular product was an empire built. Angostura has dominated its niche industry for a century and a half, enduring as many another once popular bitters (Boker's, Abbott's, and Hostetter's, for instance) fell into disuse or obscurity. The company saw no reason to fix what wasn't broken or to improve on what already seemed perfection.

Now, though, the bitters scene is changing. In 2008, Angostura introduced its first new concoction in 184 years, Angostura Orange Bitters. To understand the effect that has had on the cocktail world, imagine how mechanics might react if WD-41 suddenly appeared.

One might well assume that Angostura jumped into the orange bitters game in reaction to the recent swelling of the category. A popular ingredient in the late 19th century—some historians believe it made appearances in classic gin martinis—orange bitters had all but disappeared from bars by the mid-1900s. But during the cocktail revolution of this past decade, several new varieties of orange bitters have hit the market, include Fee's, Regan's, and the Bitter Truth.

Peter Traboulay, who formulated Angostura's new bitters, says his company was not chasing trends, though. It had been playing around with orange recipes for 20 years but had never struck a formula that satisfied company standards. When Trabouley decided to get serious about making an orange bitters, he first sampled the product of every past failed experiment. "I reviewed what was done before," he said. "That gave us a platform to take it further." Two years ago, he began creating recipes for new versions, more than 15 in all. He narrowed the list down to two finalists, which he then tested with 30 leading London bartenders. The result was inconclusive. "They were split down the middle, because the differences between the two were very subtle," he said. Trabouley broke the tie by letting the bartender who won the Angostura International Cocktail Competition make the ultimate selection.

The Angostura that reached the shelves earlier this fall is composed of 15 ingredients, including five orange oils and six different spices. "We didn't want to take away from anyone's mind that this is orange," Traboulay said, explaining the result he was after when creating the bitters. "We wanted a complex array of orange flavors and a complex array of spice. We never wanted just one flavor." Most reviews of the product have agreed that Angostura's version of orange bitters possesses a depth and complexity not found in competing products. Whereas some other orange bitters have a light, simple taste, Angostura's has a tangy, woody bite and a long finish.

Traboulay said that the world would not have to wait until the 22nd century for Angostura to stir again, as he's toying with other fruit-based bitters. Another new addition to the Angostura model might come to light in two years or so—possibly a peach bitters.