The Bitter Housewife is about making cocktails fun and approachable. Each flavor is made with all real ingredients, never extracts or flavorings, to make a cocktails better.

I got the cocktail bug managing a bar in San Francisco back in 2007. We had a seasonal cocktail menu and coming up with 10 new drinks every few months led to a lot of experimentation with fresh fruits, infusions, and ingredients not often found behind a bar. I loved playing with flavor combinations and testing out hard to find spirits.

A few years ago I started tinkering with making my own bitters and after tasting it in soda, side by side with Angostura, there was no going back. Soon a shelf in the kitchen was filled with glass jars full of fruits, herbs, spices, roots, and barks soaking in booze. I was making tinctures to get familiar with the individual flavors of all the ingredients I was working with and I was on a quest to make the perfect bitters to use in an Old Fashioned – warm and spicy, not too fruity, with a solid, bitter backbone.

Over the next few years my husband and I started pulling together the pieces that would make The Bitter Housewife a thriving company. That meant lots of recipe testing, sourcing ingredients, bottles and labels, while also figuring out how to produce more than a few bottles at a time.