A Creole pharmacist, an advertisement and a coffee house.

Peychaud’s Bitters carries the name of Antoine Amédée Peychaud, a Creole apothecary from Saint-Domingue, the French colony that became Haiti, who settled in New Orleans. The Sazerac Company, which owns the brand, says Peychaud opened his own apothecary on Royal Street in the French Quarter in 1834 and sold bitters, peppermint and alcohol to the city’s coffee houses. English Wikipedia, citing The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails (Oxford University Press, 2021), dates the creation of the bitters to between 1849 and 1857.

The link to the drink that made the bitters famous is an advertisement. Sazerac says Peychaud first advertised his product in 1857 as an “American Aromatic Bitter Cordial,” stating that it was in use at the Sazerac House, a New Orleans coffee house. The company returned to that advertisement in a release of December 2019, calling it the tie between Peychaud’s bitters and the origin of the Sazerac cocktail. English Wikipedia’s article on the drink says standard recipes call for two dashes of Peychaud’s, and it treats the story that Peychaud himself invented the cocktail as unproven.

The rights to the bitters then moved around New Orleans. According to Sazerac’s own history, Thomas H. Handy kept control of the bitters when he dissolved Thos. H. Handy Co. in 1878; Vincent Micas then bought him out, and in 1884 Micas sold his Sazerac saloon, his liquor store and the rights to the bitters to an employee, Theodore Baumann. Handy’s firm was reincorporated as the Sazerac Company, Inc. in 1919, and the company says it re-acquired Peychaud’s Bitters from L.E. Jung & Wulff Co. in 1970. Sazerac has owned the brand since then.

The company’s own ownership changed earlier. Sazerac says Magnolia Liquor Co., owned by Malcolm Woldenberg and Stephen Goldring, acquired it in 1948. English Wikipedia says William Goldring began buying shares in 1984 and eventually bought the entire company, and that Sazerac is headquartered in Metairie, Louisiana, in the New Orleans metropolitan area.

A founder’s name, a French Quarter address and a city’s cocktail.

The brand’s story is told through places. Sazerac’s timeline keeps returning to the same few New Orleans addresses: Peychaud’s apothecary on Royal Street, the Sazerac House coffee house, and the Sazerac Bar, which the company says moved from Carondelet Street to the Roosevelt Hotel on Baronne Street in 1949. Between 1940 and 1944, the company says, it advertised the “Famous Sazerac Cocktail” as served only at the Sazerac Bar, and in 1949 it obtained a copyright for its “Sazerac Cocktail Label.”

The cocktail has since become civic property. On 23 June 2008 the Louisiana Legislature agreed to proclaim the Sazerac the official cocktail of New Orleans, English Wikipedia reports, citing NPR’s All Things Considered of 26 June 2008, after a bill earlier that spring to make it the state’s official cocktail was defeated.

Production has followed the owner. English Wikipedia says Sazerac bought the George T. Stagg Distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1992 and renamed it Buffalo Trace in 1999, and the Chicago Tribune reported in February 2018 that Peychaud’s was produced there. The Tribune described the bitters as gentian-based, with a predominant anise aroma and a background of mint.

In 2019 the bitters came back to New Orleans. The Whiskey Wash reported in October 2019 that Sazerac had opened the Sazerac House, a visitor attraction in two old buildings a few hundred yards from the site of the original coffee house, with a “Power of the Dash” exhibit explaining what bitters are and how they are made. A Sazerac release of 12 December 2019 said Peychaud’s was now being produced and bottled there, though only a small portion of the total, with most still made at Buffalo Trace and the Sazerac House bottles sold in its own shop. David Bock, the attraction’s distillery operations manager, said in the release that guests would be able to watch the team make the bitters and learn about the botanicals used in the recipe.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all cocktail-bitters names: Peychaud’s, Fee Brothers, Regans’, Bittermens, Scrappy’s, The Bitter Truth and Bob’s Bitters. Cocktail bitters are concentrated flavourings, usually made by steeping herbs, spices, roots, peels or other ingredients in alcohol, and they are used a few dashes or drops at a time to season a drink rather than as a drink in their own right.

That small dose shapes how a bitters brand looks. The product is sold in a small bottle, often fitted with a dasher top or a dropper, so the label has to carry a name, a flavour and a maker in very little space, and the same bottle may sit on a bar back, a shop shelf or a kitchen counter. The brands here range from names with long histories to small makers started in this century, and some now belong to much larger drinks companies while others are still run by the people who founded them.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded the brand and when, who owns it now, where its bitters are made and how its labels and packaging have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One name, stretched from bitters to an aperitivo.

The name has carried a second product. Just Drinks reported on 18 February 2016 that Sazerac had introduced Peychaud’s Aperitivo, a mixer for cocktails sold under the bitters brand. Beyond the Sazerac, English Wikipedia lists the bitters as an ingredient in other cocktails such as the Vieux Carré and the Pendennis Club.

Peychaud’s also sits inside a wider bitters business at its owner. English Wikipedia, citing The Spirits Business, says Sazerac entered a joint venture with the American bitters maker Bittermens in March 2017.

The name needs a little care. “Sazerac” is at once the company, a cocktail, a rye whiskey made by the company and, originally, a French cognac, Sazerac de Forge et Fils, which English Wikipedia says gave the drink its name.

For a design guide, Peychaud’s shows how a founder’s surname, a French Quarter address and a single famous cocktail can hold a brand together across more than a century of changing owners. Compare Angostura, the aromatic bitters from Trinidad, and Buffalo Trace, the Kentucky distillery where most Peychaud’s is made. For this guide we use Royal Street red, crimson and coffee-house brown with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Peychaud’s’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.