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This is Highly Recommend, a column dedicated to what people in the food industry are obsessed with eating, drinking, and buying right now.
I find myself drinking Hella Cocktail Co.’s Bitters & Soda at 10 a.m. and 10 p.m., at home and in the park and at the beach. It’s exactly what it sounds like: seltzer with a heavy dash of bitters. But I like to think of it as a deeply aromatic adult soda, a nonalcoholic spritz for lovers of amaro, radicchio, and IPAs, as well as bitter converts like myself. Like many Americans, I haven’t always appreciated bitterness, but as many non-Western cultures have long been aware, it’s a beautifully rich taste in its own right, just as delightful as umami and sweetness.
Hella Cocktail Co. cofounder Jomaree Pinkard and his team have been waiting for years for an audience that would appreciate their ready-made version of that familiar sober-curious drink. As he observed Western palettes shifting slowly toward this, and as more drinkers began flirting with low-ABV and nonalcoholic beverages, Pinkard and company finally decided to put these products on the market this summer. They tinkered with 67 different recipes until they arrived at these two versions: Dry Aromatic, a purely bitter seltzer with clove and woodsy flavors, and Spritz Aromatic, a sweeter version with a bit of sugar to complement the bitterness.
The drink is strangely comforting in its complexity. You taste new flavors with each sip. More chamomile, perhaps a bit of orange peel, I’ve noticed. “People’s palettes tend to pull out notes that are familiar to them,” Pinkard told me over the phone. “If your grandma used cloves, you might pull that out of the drink. If you have memories of allspice growing up, maybe you’ll notice that. Depending on where you are from or what you cook with, you’ll have a different experience.”
These days I find myself going through the Dry Aromatic Bitters & Soda like La Croix. It’s wildly refreshing in the heat and revives me during the aeonian cycle of quarantine workdays. It’s a complex and earthy addition to the seltzer market—and to my fridge.