Mole Bitters

Mole Bitters is a concentrated aromatic cocktail bitters built to taste like Mexican mole sauce in a bottle — a dark cocoa-brown tincture of cacao, dried chilies, cinnamon and warm spices, dosed in dashes rather than poured. It is a modern bitters style, most famously commercialised by The Bitter Truth in the late 2000s, and it turned the flavour logic of Oaxacan mole poblano — chocolate braided with chili heat and baking spice — into a bartender's seasoning. On a high-proof spirit base steeped with roasted cacao nibs, ancho and other dried chilies, cinnamon and clove, it carries deep bittersweet chocolate over a slow chili warmth and a firm, drying bitterness. A dash or two transforms an agave or dark-spirit drink — the Oaxaca Old Fashioned being its signature home — the way a spoon of mole transforms a plate.