Making mocktails with 18.21 Bitters
Ponce City Market shop raises a glass to booze-free drinking
Located in Ponce City Market, 18.21 Bitters was named with a nod to the Prohibition-era amendment and repeal. The shop sells house-made bitters, tinctures, shrubs, syrups, old fashioned tonic, ginger beer, and craft cocktail mixes. They also offer tastings and classes to curious cocktail aficionados and newbies alike. The drinks they blend for sipping onsite or taking home in bottles are virgin, but perfectly prepped for adding your own alcohol at home, if you so desire.
Craft cocktail connoisseur and 18.21 co-founder Kristen Koefod said she and her wife Missy, a former bar owner, were inspired by both 1920s speakeasy culture and New Orleans, the self-proclaimed birthplace of cocktails. As business took off, 18.21 Bitters started making non-alcoholic mocktails in their Old Fourth Ward speakeasy, developing cocktail recipes by playing around with bitters and tinctures.
“When we first started the business, we were making cocktails every day and needed our friends to try them to get feedback,” Kristen says. “Most of them were pregnant at the time, so we started making mocktails to keep them included.”
Premium bitters and tinctures add depth and zest, so that even spirit-free concoctions can be spirited. Bitters are flavor extracts made by infusing plant parts, from bark to berries to roots, in alcohol. Tinctures are also concentrated infusions, much like bitters without the bittering agent, and serve to pump up the flavor of a cocktail. Both contain alcohol, but are doled out in such small amounts (literally, by the drop) that they alone won’t turn a mocktail into a cocktail. Shrubs are drinking vinegars, similar to kombucha, and also contain only trace amounts of booze.
Dating back to ancient times, these ingredients have experienced a recent resurgence in mixology. 18.21 makes good use of all of them; their tasty blood orange and tonic mocktail is made from blood orange and ginger shrub, tonic, and orange, while their Garden Party mocktail blends house-made bitters, tonic, and rosemary.
The Koefods have seen the rise of a new trend in drinks, known as the “sleepover mocktail.” “When we first opened our retail store, I noticed a lot of young girls coming in and wanting to try our syrup for sleepovers,” says Missy. “I never even knew what a mocktail was growing up, but I definitely tell the younger crowd about sleepover mocktails and they get it.”
18.21 Bitters’ Apple GALA mocktail is a great way to celebrate the fall season.
Ingredients:
1 oz apple cardamom shrub
½ oz lemon juice
10 drops Prohibition Aromatic Bitters
Instructions:
Stir ingredients together and shake.
Top with soda water and garnish with apple slice before serving.
18.21 Bitters. Ponce City Market. 675 Ponce De Leon Ave. N.E. 404-852-7023. www.1821bitters.com.