Bitters

A dash is one quick inversion of the bottle, and through a standard dasher top it lands somewhere near a millilitre. It is not a precise unit, and any recipe written in dashes assumes a tolerance around it. Two or three dashes is the usual dose in a stirred drink. Because the dose is that small, bitters change the aroma and the finish of a drink without changing its volume.

Aromatic bitters are the baseline: warm spice, bark and a dry bitterness, and the style that classic recipes assume when they simply say bitters. Orange and other citrus bitters are lighter and sit forward on the nose. Beyond those two are dozens of specialised bottles built around a single flavour, and almost none of them are necessary.

The best known aromatic bitters takes its name from a town in Venezuela, since renamed Ciudad Bolivar, rather than from angostura bark, which is a different plant material and is generally said not to be in the recipe at all. The formula itself has never been published, so nobody outside the company that makes it can confirm what is in there. Details of the origin story vary between tellings, so treat the version printed on any bottle as marketing rather than as a record.

Not in any practical sense. The alcohol content is high enough to keep the infusion stable, and a bottle kept upright, out of direct sun and properly capped stays usable for years. The colour may deepen. What does fail is the dasher top, which clogs with dried residue, so rinse it when the pour turns uneven.

Stirred, spirit-forward drinks are where they belong. An old fashioned is sugar, spirit, ice and bitters, and without the bitters it is just sweetened whisky. A manhattan takes two or three dashes. Away from cocktails, a few dashes over ice with soda and a squeeze of citrus makes a long drink of its own, and a dash in a ginger ale gives it a dry backbone it otherwise lacks.