When Sam Anderson of Mission Chinese Food came to our rooftop garden, we knew that he would create something both impressive and off-the-wall. After all, this is a bartender who names tom kha soup-flavored cocktails after Phil Collins and puts za’atar in his egg creams.
But Anderson had a plan right off the bat: to transform our overgrown bushes of botanicals from our garden into something strong, heady, and very alcoholic. That is, our very own batch of cocktail bitters. After all, aren’t pineapple sage, lemongrass, Thai basil, nasturtium, and wildflowers just begging to be drowned in neutral grain spirits?
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Mission Chinese Food’s Beverage Director, Sam Anderson, picking botanicals in the MUNCHIES Garden on the VICE rooftop.
“I was originally going to use classically structured bitters and use a small amount of Szechuan peppercorns and maybe two to three kinds of herbs and citrus, but once I walked onto the rooftop garden at the new VICE office and saw how much variety there I was, I wanted to do something that was much less linear in profile,” Anderson explained.
Sam harvesting pineapple sage.
The botanical haul from the garden.
Zesting citrus peels for the bitters.
Making your own cocktail bitters might seem intimidating, but as we learned by watching Anderson get to work, it’s actually a relatively simple infusion that just requires a basket full of herbs, a bundle of citrus, and a couple of bottles of high-proof clear liquor. “I wanted it to be a very big bouquet of fresh herbs, and let the Szechuan peppercorn come in at the end,” Anderson said.
His steps were simple: drown heaps of fresh botanicals—divided equally—inside two giant mason jars with neutral grain spirits. Then he added zested citrus, fresh citrus wheels, and a few add-in spices like cardamom and coriander to the jars. To control the buzzing sensation from the peppercorns, Anderson added twice as many to one of the mason jars. “Having not done this before, I used two giant mason jars so that there were two versions: a mild-strength base version and a double-strength, higher gravity version, so I could blend them to a point where all those flavors were popping in the right way, so that the peppercorn wasn’t too overwhelming and didn’t put everything else in the background,” he explained.
The base spirit for the bitters.
The final bitters product before it steeps for three weeks.
But what if you don’t have access to one of the most beautiful rooftop gardens with all of the produce you could ever want? “You can swap in your favorite fresh herbs from a bodega or the grocery store for the kinds that we used,” Anderson reassured us.
So after our giant jars of tingling, floral cocktail bitters steeped for three weeks, we had a lot of inventory. There was only one thing left to do with the excess: turn the remainder into the drink of gods, a.k.a. fernet.
A traditional style of the amaro is fernet, made with a variety of herbs and spices (which varies by brand), but will almost always include myrrh, rhubarb, chamomile, cardamom, aloe, and saffron.
But this is Brooklyn, and there’s no myrrh or saffron growing on our rooftop, so Anderson improvised with what we had.
Sam pouring the DIY fernet over ice.
“To make your own DIY fernet, you can use dried herbs at home (for the base bitters), but I think you get better flavors from using fresh herbs. According to where you live, you can add your own local ingredients like fresh basil.” Once you’ve brewed your own bitters batch, all that’s left to do is to gently heat the strained bitters, water, sugar, and the rum together until all of the sugar is dissolved (it will only take you a few minutes). Bottle and seal the stuff and let it sit for a few months. The longer you let it steep, the better it gets.
It might not stick to the traditional recipe, but you’re looking at DIY fernet.
You can serve the final product on the rocks with a twist or pretend you’re chef Erik Anderson and take shots of your own fernet like there’s no tomorrow.
