Two Bitter Drinks from Andrew Bohrer
The Bitter Handshake & Elena's Virtue
Two Bitter Drinks from Andrew Bohrer
When I lived in Seattle from 1999 through early 2010 I had courtside seats to the city’s influential role in the modern cocktail revival, witnessing the evolution of the Seattle bar scene firsthand.
When I first landed in Seattle, Canadian bartender and blogger Jamie Boudreau was working at a Lower Queen Anne high-volume bar called Tini Bigs where every drink (no matter the ingredients) ended in “-tini” and was served in a giant V-shaped glass. Before he went on to open his award-winning bar Canon, Boudreau helped open and run Vessel, where a future all-star squad of up-and-coming bartenders rotated behind the stick, including many who would go on to open their own bars. Bartenders around Seattle were using bottles of Miles Thomas’ homemade Scrappy’s Bitters, which is now seen at top cocktail bars around the world. And let us not forget the late Murray Stenson, a veteran bartender who helped revive the Last Word cocktail and served as a spirited sensei to countless bartenders.
Seattle was also home to drinks writers like like Robert Hess (cofounder of the Museum of the American Cocktail), Paul Clarke (now editor in chief of Imbibe magazine), and A.J. Rathbun. It was around 2008 when I published my first story in Seattle Met magazine set against the landscape of Seattle’s cocktail scene and the proposal for my first book, Bitters, was acquired by Ten Speed Press.
But among the many bartenders I met in those days, it was Andrew Bohrer who always caught my attention, whether he was offering a deep-dive discourse on Armagnac, stirring up yet another inventive drink, or sharing the finer points of carving ice (whether by hand with a Japanese knife or with an electric chainsaw).