A bar request, a pastry kitchen and a single flavour at a time.

Bob’s Bitters is the cocktail-bitters brand of Bob Petrie, a British former pastry chef. The brand’s own mark carries the words “established 2005,” and the company tells its origin story through the London bar trade rather than through a distillery. According to the company, Petrie was head pastry chef at a number of high-end, Michelin-starred restaurants in London when the bar manager Giuliano Morandin asked him to create a selection of bespoke bitters. La Maison du Whisky, the French spirits retailer that stocks the range, says the first bitters were made in partnership with the head bartender of the Dorchester, the London hotel.

The idea, the company says, was a small range of bitters that mirrored the flavours of gin’s botanicals — cardamom, ginger and grapefruit among them. It says the bitters were well received by bartenders, and that Petrie then went further, building a suite of single-ingredient bitters, each meant to heighten one particular note in a cocktail.

That culinary angle is the brand’s main story about itself. The website introduces Petrie as an “ex-pastry chef” who approached bitters “from a culinary perspective,” and its product pages suggest uses in desserts, glazes and sauces as well as in drinks. The trade press has used the same description: when The Spirits Business reported a new bitters for Fortnum & Mason in August 2020, it named Petrie as “the founder of UK-based producer Bob’s Bitters.”

One flavour per bottle, then a few blends.

The core of the range is a run of single-flavour bitters. The company’s current list includes cardamom, chocolate, coriander and ginger bitters alongside grapefruit, lavender, liquorice, orange and mandarin, peppermint and vanilla; its website spells the first of these “Cardamon”. Two older flavours have been reworked and now carry a “#2” in their names, Ginseng #2 and Tonka #2, which the company describes as refined, renewed versions of earlier recipes.

The company explains its method in general terms. It says the bitters are made by steeping the named ingredient in locally sourced alcohol, that the single-ingredient bitters take around five weeks, and that Petrie commissioned a bespoke filtration unit and hydraulic press for what it calls his bitters kitchen. The exact recipes, it says, are kept secret.

The best-known exception to the single-ingredient rule is Bob’s Abbotts Bitters, a reconstruction of Abbott’s Bitters, an aromatic bitters whose recipe the company dates to the nineteenth century. It says Petrie spent five years developing it with the bartender and distiller Jake Burger of London’s Portobello Star bar and Portobello Road Gin, working from tests on a rare surviving bottle of the original, because no official recipe had been recorded. It says the blend uses 29 ingredients steeped in whisky and is aged in oak barrels.

A seasonal range followed. According to the company, Petrie first created Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter bitters in 2011 for the Four Seasons Hotel on Park Lane in London; they were released more widely as a limited edition in 2017 and, the company says, proved popular enough to stay in the range all year.

Bitters and their brands.

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.

A small Essex maker with well-known partners.

The brand is run by The Cocktail Alchemist Limited, the company named on its website. Companies House records that the company was incorporated in England in February 2014, that it is active, and that Petrie has been one of its directors since then; its registered activities include the manufacture of fermented beverages and the wholesale of alcoholic drinks. The company says Petrie hand-makes, bottles, labels and distributes the bitters from his own unit in Essex, and the same claim appeared on its website in an archived copy from 2018. The firm is based in Southend-on-Sea, according to its website and the Companies House register.

Much of the brand’s reach has come through work for other names. In August 2020, The Spirits Business reported that Fortnum & Mason had launched a Tea & Honey Aromatic Cocktail Bitters created by Petrie, two years in the making and flavoured with five teas and honey from Galicia in Spain. The paper said the suggested signature serve was a Lemon, Lime and Bitters made with Double Dutch lemonade; Bob’s Bitters says the bitters are sold only by the Piccadilly store. Bob’s Bitters also makes Difford’s Daiquiri Bitters and Difford’s Margarita Bitters for the drinks writer Simon Difford’s guide; on the bitters maker’s website Difford is quoted as saying that some classic cocktails, “particularly the daiquiri and margarita,” lacked the extra complexity that bitters might add. The company also says Petrie helped the St James’s Street chemist D. R. Harris bring back its old Pick-Me-Up in a new form, as a cocktail bitters.

The brand’s presentation stays close to its founder. The website, which it credits to the design studio Antenna, is written around “Bob” in the third person, and the company describes its packaging as “vintage-style pipette bottles.”

For a design guide, Bob’s Bitters shows how a one-person maker can build a brand on a founder’s name and a single idea — one flavour per bottle. Compare Angostura, the aromatic bitters made in Trinidad, and The Bitter Truth, the German bitters brand. For this guide we use amber, parchment and a gentian green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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