The Great Bitters Experiment

2013

Sending holiday cheer every year with handcrafted packaging.

Extracurricular project with a friend

Each of the first five years after graduating from college, I spent August to November designing a holiday gift to send to ~100 people – friends, family, and most importantly prospective freelance clients and agencies. This gesture allowed me both a creative outlet and also filled my freelance pipeline for the next six months. Of all the projects, 2013’s Great Bitters Experiment was the most memorable.

All the essentials for a happy new year.

Each package included a half-ounce bottle of bitters, handstamped box, a sack of sugar cubes, and Champagne Cocktail recipe card.

We drew inspiration from all kinds of packaging, ultimately walking the line between modern and the traditional medicinal feel of old bitters packaging.

First things first: we set out to deliver the best bitters this side of Brooklyn.

Bitters are a highly concentrated mixture of flavors that bring out the complexity of other ingredients in a cocktail. You only need a few drops at a time.

Bitters can be made up of any number of single-ingredient infusions (or tinctures). We infused 36 different flavors which we combined in different ratios to create different flavors of bitters.

Once the tinctures had infused (taking anywhere from a few hours for chilies to a few weeks for cacao nibs), we used a very scientific process to determine the ultimate recipe—lots of taste-testing in Champagne cocktails. Our favorite ended up being Bitters #9.

Once we had a recipe, we started on the packaging design.

From tinctures to final package: a two month journey.

The packages made it out just in time to wish 200 friends a happy new year.

...But why stop at product packaging? With our newfound mixology knowledge, we designed and built a recipe website.

When it was live (RIP little guy), the site had over a hundred recipes with custom illustrations for different cocktails and baked goods that went well with the flavor of our bitters.