The story of how a really cool small bitters company grew from idea to reality.
by Anna Monaco, Owner, TNT Bitters Co.
I’ve worked for The Berkshire Food Co-op for over 2 years now and I still love my job as much now as I did when I started. The meat, seafood, & specialty team members ensure that each day is tons of fun, productive, and as low stress as it can be. I also own a bitters company based in upstate NY about an hour and a half north of the Co-op. I’ve written so many articles for this magazine, usually highlighting my bitters since we sell my full line of products here. I’ve written about using bitters in cocktails, to provide maximum health benefits, and using bitters in your food - an area people tend to be less familiar with. Sometimes, though, I write about non bitters things. One article even went back in time to my summer camp where I decided I wanted a career in food and talked about vegetarian lasagna. What I haven’t written yet is about my bitters company itself. So here goes!
Tonic & Tinctures Bitters Company, Inc (or TNT Bitters Co as we call ourselves) started officially in the fall of 2017. I guess the idea for it started before that though. Let me paint you a picture…
My founding partner Mike and I have known each other since our high school days on the upper west side of Manhattan where we both grew up. My best friend Debra (from aforementioned summer camp) went to high school with Mike and through various birthday and weekend gatherings, Mike and I met. It wasn’t really until we graduated from college that we started hanging out regularly. Mike, Debra, and I would get together for dinner/drinks almost every Thursday for over a year. Our weekly, early 20s style evenings would consist of cheap beer, $1 frozen margaritas, and late night conversations.
Anna & Mike on his birthday (which also happens to be Margarita Day) with vials of margs for an Amtrak trip
Many of these late night convos were about me and Mike going into business together. I had just graduated culinary school and was working for the now-well-known burger restaurant company Shake Shack. Mike was working at a law firm with an impressive home bar set-up, reading as many bar books as he could get his hands on. He would be front of house, managing the restaurant, and I would manage the kitchen. It was the perfect balance.
We used to draw menu items on bar napkins and design cocktails over shots of whiskey. We would come up with restaurant concepts and names and service models. We had such grand plans but alas, we soon realized that these plans might be more of a pipe dream than an attainable one. We put it on the back burner and went back to sipping our overly sweet mixed drinks while we scream-sang to the DJ’s playlist at our local joint.
These pipe dreams were still there though, even as I moved to CT to help expand the Shake Shack empire and as Mike became a full time bartender in the East Village. I moved back to New York and started giving food themed walking tours of the city. I would end close to the bar he worked at and we quickly fell back into our dreaming pattern, this time over more sophisticated cocktails and better beer.
It was there that we started thinking outside of the restaurant box. We both wanted a career in food and beverage but perhaps in a production capacity instead of owning a restaurant - a notoriously difficult job. As both of us love bitters, we started researching how to make them and thought maybe this could be an option.
About 8 years ago, Mike and his then-girlfriend-now-wife Carly were thinking of moving out of the city. His parents had always had a house in Cambridge, NY on the VT border which seemed like a good place to start. They moved to a small town in the area and I hopped on an Amtrak train to go visit. While visiting, he proposed the idea of me moving up there as well and perhaps moving our back burner dreams front and center. I agreed and in the spring of 2017, I followed them upstate.
Anna, Mike and Debra on Anna’s 25th birthday
We quickly realized that the amount of capital needed to start a restaurant compared to a bitters business was vastly different. Bitters suddenly seemed so much more feasible. Now came the fun part; playing mad scientist in my kitchen. Time to bust out the food dehydrator and cheesecloth and get to work!
I’ve never been a recipe person. I like learning basics through recipes but I’m more of a “taste and adjust as I go” type of chef. It’s why I’m not a baker and why I can never produce the same pot of chili twice. Culinary school at least taught me the value of recipes and how to interpret them, using my pallet as a guide. Making bitters, however, was a whole different story.
To make bitters - for those of you who haven’t swung by the meat and seafood counter and been roped into a long, drawn out answer already - you put “stuff” in alcohol and let it sit for 2 weeks. Then you strain out the stuff, add some simple syrup and water, and presto chango, you’ve got bitters. The artistry is in the balance of flavors among the elusive “stuff”. We categorize our stuff into two groups; flavoring agents and bittering agents. Flavoring agents can be cinnamon sticks, citrus rinds, or fresh poblano peppers. Bittering agents are things like gentian root, birch leaf, and quassia wood chips. We spent a few months perfecting our recipes (remember, one batch takes 2 weeks from start to finish before you can taste and adjust) and eventually started actually selling product right around Christmas in 2018 with our core 4 flavors.
Alibi (aromatic + citrus), A Better Name Than Kamikaze (horseradish + ginger), Napalm In The Morning (espresso), and Pink Mist (smoked grapefruit) were our original 4 flavors. About a year later, we added Fire In The Hole (poblano) and then just before COVID hit, we launched our sixth and final flavor Sucker Punch (lime). I know I’m super biased here, but our bitters are delicious! They are much more bitter than most cocktail bitters, leaning more towards the medicinal flavor and bitter agents in them. As all bitters can do the same thing for your health, we wanted to take the cocktail side and really focus on good flavors in addition to all the good things bitters can do for you.
When COVID closed all bars and restaurants for a little while across the world, our main client base dwindled. We paused some new product development and settled into whatever 2020 was. As social justice movements began to take hold of the nation, we also decided our little, tiny, baby company should use our platform for good. We recognized, and still do, that we are two very privileged white millennials. Since then, each Wednesday, we create social media posts we refer to as #wecarewednesday posts which highlight a person, product, or business in the food and beverage world that is owned or operated by an underrepresented group. From women and people of color to the LGBTQ+ community, we want to take our flashlight - no matter how small - and shine it on others. A rising tide lifts all boats so we want to help that tide.
While we paused production of bitters, various governmental mandates were lifted/enacted allowing us to process hand sanitizer with our base alcohol (called grain neutral spirit in our world). We made lavender/aloe hand sanitizer and donated all profit from those bottles to the United States Bartenders Guild emergency assistance program. Bartenders, servers, chefs, and many hospitality support staff were out of work for a while. As our business was still more of a side project, we wanted to support our food and beverage family as best we could. We still donate annually to the Bartender Emergency Assistance Program (BEAP) which provides financial assistance to bartenders around the country facing hardships.
And that brings us to the present. Our company is just over 6 years old and we are sold at about a dozen brick and mortar stores around the country. There are restaurants around the northeast who regularly use our bitters. During summer months we participate in farmers markets and in the winters we are vendors in NYC at holiday markets. We sell on our website and ship right to your door. We are still trucking along and consistently trying to put out community focused, informative, and fun content whenever possible.
So grab a sample pack of bitters (packaged like a stick of dynamite because, with a name like TNT, how could we not!), and swing by the Meat, Seafood, & Specialty department and let’s chat about all things bitters!
Cheers!
TNT Sample Pack!
