“Traditionally, bitters are used only [in] small dashes for seasoning,” says Bone Cheng, founder of Bar Tincture, the Ginza-style cocktail establishment that opened in Hong Kong in April. “But the Trinidad Sour elevates bitters to the main spirit. This inversion concept is very bold – it challenges the conventional definition of a base spirit and proves that bitters can form the soul of a complete cocktail.”
This statement encapsulates his mission for Bar Tincture, one of the few bars in Hong Kong to make bitters a central theme – even going so far as to make them in-house and use them as a base for signatures. Bitters are almost always relegated to a finishing touch, whether it’s a few dashes of Angostura or orange bitters to an Old Fashioned, or a choice dab of Peychaud’s to give a Sazerac an aromatic lift. Amaro – Italian for “bitter” – often plays a more prominent role in cocktails featuring spirits such as Amaro Montenegro or Fernet-Branca, but its flavour is more of an acquired taste.
Cheng’s move is a bold one, so it stands to reason that the concept lives or dies on whether he can pull off one of the few modern classics to showcase bitters in a new way: the Trinidad Sour. According to Cheng, the drink was created around 2009 by Giuseppe González at the Clover Club in New York, using Angostura bitters as the base.
“When designing the Homemade Style [red aperitivo] series for Bar Tincture,” Cheng says, “we wanted to interpret this drink using our own house-made bitters. Our bitters are made using a variety of spices, barks and herbs via sous vide. After filtering, they are blended with five to six house-made tinctures for seasoning, followed by short-term ageing to allow the flavours to integrate fully.”
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