Now that the Green Swizzle has arisen in the Falernum discussion, perhaps it’s time to dig in a little to wormwood bitters?
The Green Swizzle is an island drink that was around in the first couple decades of the 20th Century before fading out (and being replaced by a different Green Swizzle that involves green crème de menthe). @Splificator and @dsoneil write about the Green Swizzle in the in the OCS (p. 335-6) and it also gets an earlier section in the revised edition of Imbibe! In this case the wormwood bitters is “a simple infusion of wormwood and strong rum”.
Sounds like a Caribbean island version of a simple Old World remedy: snip some sprigs of whatever species of artemesia you’ve got in your back yard, cover them in whatever alcohol you’ve got, strain when ready. The art, I presume, is in selecting the infusion components and recognizing when to arrest it.
Wormwood bitters were commercialized back in the 19th Century, and this old post by Ferdinand Meyer shows off some intriguing advertising. There are a pile of commercial “wormwood bitters” on the market, today. Most seem to be from dubious cottage industries. I have a bottle of the one Berkshire Mountain Distillers made for Cocktail Kingdom, and it’s in a dasher bottle, tastes straight bitter and is obviously spiced with cloves (and probably something else). Not a rum base.
I have fond memories of wormwood bitters because my name accidentally ended up on a certain commercial brand of them back in the blogging heyday. No idea how that happened.
Later, I was at a cocktail bar and the bartender was being completely condescending to me and my friends. He had a bottle of those bitters on his bar so I asked him to show me them then showed him my ID. (I did also explain that my name was on there by mistake, but watching him backpedal before I got to that was very amusing.)
Seems like you made a blog post about wormwood bitters and Berkshire Mountain Distillers used your recipe and wanted to credit you on one of the early production runs. Your name’s not on the bottle I have. And I couldn’t find that post using the search function on your blog.
I never heard of Berkshire before today. I just knew they were Cocktail Kingdom. But no, I never posted about them, and Greg wasn’t sure how they thought I was affiliated with them.
The Caribbean wormwood bitters were very simple indeed. Here’s some argument from an 1873 excise case that hinged on whether Angostura bitters were a spirituous liquor, as reported Barbados Agricultural Reporter:
