About Woodster Bitters

My journey to starting this company is an interesting one. I have always had a passion for cocktails and made my own for years. Even in high school when my dad would let me play bartender. Around ten years ago, I was competing in a Big Green Egg (smoker) competition and decided that since I liked the smokey nature of scotch, but my preferred drink of choice was an Old Fashioned, I would smoke the oranges and cherries to muddle. The result was fantastic, and now the only way I wanted to drink one, we dubbed them Egg Fashioned. A year later, we won a cocktail-making class hosted by a nationally recognized bartender at a local restaurant at my son's preschool auction about a year later. During this, he made a point that you shouldn't muddle fruit in a bourbon drink and only use bitters to attain that flavor. This knowledge set me on the search for different bitters to get what I wanted. I could not find what I wanted with the nationally available brands. The small craft bitters did not offer flavors that I wanted or honestly could understand. The following year for Christmas, my wife got me a bitters recipe book. Of course, the first one I made was a smoked version of the orange bitters. After dozens of iterations, I had one that was exactly what I was looking for. Not satisfied with just one, I started experimenting with other flavors and options, sometimes with a specific drink in mind and sometimes trying to get a flavor that would work with a type of liquor or drink. Read their story