Review: Cocktail & Sons Tonic #15 and Max Bitter Collection
Our friends at New Orleans’ Cocktail & Sons are known for their syrup mixers, and now the company is branching out into bitters — under the “Max Bitter” brand name. Today we’re looking at the latest cocktail sweetener from the operation, plus its three inaugural bitters offerings.
Cocktail & Sons Tonic #15 – Made with bitter herbs and spices, citrus, baking spices, and peppercorns. Mix with gin and club soda to make a gin and tonic, without traditional tonic water. The syrup on its own is bright with citrus, cinnamon, and cloves — in that order — with a modest bitterness tempering a fairly mild sweetness. The finished product in a mixed G&T is a little difficult to dial in perfectly — I think a bit more than the suggested 1:4 ratio of tonic syrup to gin is called for — but it does make for a more exotic and vaguely Eastern experience that evoked saffron and curry powder in my concoction, with a bracing, bitter backbone. (I used 135 East gin.) A fun alternative to the usual construction, though it’s not without some work on the creator’s part. A- / $15 per 16 oz bottle
Next up, the three bitters. Each 4 oz bottle comes with a handle eyedropper built into the closure.
Max Bitter Aromatic – Listed ingredients include coffee, cocoa nibs, sugar, baking spices, orange peel, bitter herbs, and peppercorns. Quite cinnamon-heavy, followed by ginger. Sustained nosing evokes gingersnaps clearly. More peppery and racy on the tongue, with ample black pepper and a big mocha/coffee note on the finish. Not quite what I was expecting but it makes for a bracing, more Christmassy alternative to the more pungent, clove-focused Angostura in cocktails. A- / $18 per 4 oz bottle
Max Bitter Citrus – Includes lemongrass, ginger, sugar, cardamom, lemon and orange peel, and bitter herbs. Considerably bitter, with an overtone of grapefruit peel (though that’s not listed in the ingredients), followed by a peppery finish (again, there’s no pepper in the list). Time in glass helps the lemongrass element to show itself more clearly, again quite bitter with less of the traditional orange peel quality that I’d expected here. (Though to be fair, they are “citrus” bitters, not orange bitters.) Rather blunt and drying on the finish, as the fruit quickly dissipates. Taste it before you try to sub it in for, say, Regan’s. B / $18 per 4 oz bottle
Max Bitter Crescent City – Includes mint, hibiscus, baking spices, sugar, lemon and orange peel, bitter herbs, cranberries, and peppercorns. Crescent City is of course New Orleans, and this is an appropriately bright red simulacrum of Peychaud’s Bitters. The hibiscus-driven florals are hard to miss, giving the bitters a more perfumed quality than Peychaud’s offers, backed by a cardamom-like character that evokes incense and Turkish rug shops. Extremely bitter and biting on the finish — possibly the most aggressively bitter bottle in the trio, for better or worse. B+ / $18 per 4 oz bottle
Max Bitter Crescent City
$18
