The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

by Amy Stewart

  The lawsuits continued in the United States. In 1884 a series of legal actions between the Siegert brothers and C. W. Abbott & Co. began for much the same reason. Abbott also claimed that angostura bark was a key ingredient in his bitters, which gave him protection under the law. Once again, the Siegerts remained silent on their own formula, claiming that the name came from the city, not the tree. This time, things did not go so well for the Siegerts.

  The judge ruled that no one can claim a monopoly on the name of a city, even if that city’s name had been changed decades ago. And no one could trademark the name of an ingredient or another term that simply describes what the product is. Besides, the judge pointed out, the Siegerts weren’t using the term Angostura bitters at all until their competitors did so. They had been calling their product Aromatic Bitters; it was only the general public that had taken to calling them Angostura bitters.

  Continuing his examination of the evidence, the judge chided the Siegerts because their label still read “Prepared by Dr. Siegert” even though the doctor was deceased. The Siegerts lost their case and Abbott continued to sell Angostura bitters. In subsequent rulings, judges found even more to dislike about the Siegerts’ case, including their unsubstantiated claim that the bitters had medicinal purposes. Their luck ran out in Germany as well, where their application for a trademark was denied by a judge who flatly stated that angostura bark was used in the preparation of angostura bitters, and as such the name could not be trademarked.

  It was not until 1903 that judges finally began ruling in favor of the Siegerts and granting them the exclusive right to the name Angostura bitters. The Abbott company, commenting not just on its own case but on other similar cases that were now being decided in favor of the Siegerts, issued a statement that expressed its frustration: “Our bitters are made out of Angostura bark. This is the point in our case. And the court did not pass upon it.”

  In February 1905, the United States updated its trademark laws. It took only three months for the Siegert brothers to file their application under the new law. The application claimed that “the trade mark has been continuously used by us and by our predecessors in business for about the last 74 years past,” and that “no other person, firm, corporation or association” had the right to use the trademark. It was approved.

  Today the label remains more or less unchanged from the original patent application, with a few exceptions. By 1952, the company had filed an updated label design omitting medical claims and a suggestion that bitters be served to children, and a new phrase had been added: “Does Not Contain Angostura Bark.”

  SODA and BITTERS

  If you ever find yourself in the unfortunate position of sitting in a bar when you are unwilling or unable to have a drink, order a club soda with bitters. It has the advantage of looking like a proper drink and is surprisingly restorative.

  THE CHAMPAGNE COCKTAIL

  This classic drink is an excellent way to appreciate the flavor of the angostura tree. The Fee Brothers version proudly claims to contain the bark.

  1 sugar cube

  3 to 4 dashes Fee Brothers Old Fashion Aromatic Bitters

  Champagne

  Lemon twist

  Drop the sugar cube into a flute, splash a few drops of bitters on the sugar, and fill with Champagne. Garnish with a twist of lemon peel.

  So was angostura bark ever an ingredient in Dr. Siegert’s recipe or only in those of his competitors? The Siegerts managed to get through thirty years of litigation without revealing their secret formula in any published court record. They did claim that their bitters would treat stomachaches and fevers—the very maladies angostura bark was supposed to treat. (They also said that the bitters should not be used “in the manufacture of cocktails” but added that they should be dashed into a wine glass and topped with rum, wine, or any other spirit, and taken “before breakfast or dinner, or at any other hour of the day, if you should feel inclined,” which sounds rather like a cocktail. They also recommended applying them to “new rum” to improve the taste.)

  Another strange clue as to the original ingredients comes in the form of an advertisement placed in a theater magazine by the Siegert company in 1889. The ad claims that Dr. Siegert met Alexander von Humboldt in Venezuela in 1839 and prescribed his bitters to the explorer when he became sick. There was just one problem with this story: von Humboldt was in Berlin in 1839. He had, in fact, become sick in Venezuela during his 1799 to 1804 expedition and had been treated with angostura bark—the one ingredient that the company now claims not to use in its bitters.

  It’s hard to believe that a medicinal bitters, invented in Angostura, Argentina, that claims to treat fever and stomach problems, would not contain a well-known plant that grew in the area and was already used for those very problems. The use of angostura bark in pharmaceutical preparations is well documented in the nineteenth century. In fact, the realization that angostura bark was sometimes adulterated with the poisonous bark of the strychnine tree led to widespread warnings to druggists to be on the alert when compounding their own angostura bitters. Obviously, the bark was widely used at one point. Why would Dr. Siegert have omitted it from his formula?

  The new trademark laws passed at the end of that century made one thing clear: anyone who made bitters with angostura bark would be legally entitled to call their product angostura bitters because it was a plain statement of the nature of the product. The only way to trademark the name would be to make the case about something other than the ingredients—and that’s what the Siegert brothers did.

  If their formula once contained angostura bark, when did they drop the ingredient? It’s possible that Dr. Siegert realized early on that the bark could be mistaken for strychnine bark and decided to steer clear of it. Or if he did use it, perhaps the recipe changed when the company moved to Trinidad, or after the Siegerts’ legal conundrum became apparent.

  Or, as astute readers might have already wondered, perhaps the formula never changed. After all, the label on the bottle today only says that the product does not contain angostura bark. No mention is made of another legally recognized ingredient, angostura extract, or of the tree’s trunk, leaves, roots, flowers, or seeds.

  AGARIC

  Laricifomes officinalis

  fomitopsidaceae (bracket fungus family)

  One of the only fungi known to flavor spirits, the white agaric or larch agaric is a shelf-shaped fungus that colonizes larch trees and a few hardwood species as well. Years of overharvesting has made it scarce in Europe, and its use is severely restricted owing to potential toxicity. It can cause vomiting and other health problems at high doses, but as with many mushrooms, it is also being investigated for medicinal uses. Regardless, it is permitted in very limited quantities as a bitter flavoring in alcoholic beverages and is a known ingredient in Fernet-style amaros. The fungus goes by a number of names but should never be confused with fly agaric, the psychoactive mushroom Amanita muscaria.

  BIRCH

  Betula papyrifera

  betulaceae (alder family)

  Americans might not have invented birch beer, but we certainly perfected it. Birch trees are found all over North America, Europe, and Asia. Over the centuries they’ve been put to use as lumber and paper, as dye and resin, and as medicine. Archeologists have turned up drinking vessels in Europe dating back to 800 BC that contained birch sap residue, suggesting that it was used in wine making just as honey was.

  Starting in the early seventeenth century, several scientists wrote about the use of birch sap in medicinal, or purely recreational, liquors. Flemish physician Johannes Baptista van Helmont wrote that birch sap could be collected in spring and poured “into the Ale, after the greatest settlement of its boyling or working, which Wines and Ales do voluntarily undergo in Hogs-heads.” He recommended this naturally fermented sap as a treatment for ailments of the kidneys, urinary tract, and bowels.

  A few decades later, in 1662, John Evelyn offered this recipe in Sylva, the first book on forestry
ever published: “To every gallon of birch-water put a quart of honey, well stirr’d together; then boil it almost an hour with a few cloves, and a little limon-peel, keeping it well scumm’d: When it is sufficiently boil’d, and become cold, add to it three or four spoonfuls of good ale to make it work (which it will do like new ale) and when the yeast begins to settle, bottle it up as you do other winy liquors. It will in a competent time become a most brisk and spiritous drink.”

  But it was the American paper birch—the aptly named papyrifera—that yielded abundant, sweet sap just when early colonists could most use a drink. The settlers watched Native Americans tap birch trees in spring and capture the sap, but what they didn’t see them do was make alcohol from it. In spite of abundant sources of sugar and grain, northern tribes did not seem to develop a tradition of brewing alcohol the way southwestern and Latin American native people did. But Europeans knew a good source of alcohol when they found it; they mixed the sweet sap and bark with water, honey, and whatever spices they could obtain to make a mildly alcoholic beer. Sassafras was often an ingredient; from this tradition the drink, sarsaparilla, became popular in Pennsylvania Dutch country.

  By the time Prohibition drew near, brewers were creating non-alcoholic versions, called soft drinks, to get around the ban. Nonalcoholic birch beer remained a regional specialty throughout the twentieth century. Today the flavor returns in Root, the Pennsylvania-made liqueur based on the flavor of early American bark and root brews. A few wineries in the Scottish Highlands specialize in birch wine, and a Ukrainian vodka distiller employs the flavor in its Nemiroff Birch Special Vodka.

  Birch sap can be used to produce xylitol, a natural sweetener that has been found to fight tooth decay, and the bark of some species are high in methyl salicylate, the primary constituent in oil of wintergreen. And as usual, the early physicians who prescribed the bark weren’t entirely wrong: a birch extract called betulinic acid is being investigated as an anticancer drug.

  CASCARILLA

  Croton eluteria

  euphorbiaceae (spurge family)

  This small, highly fragrant tree must have seemed like a natural addition to spirits. The bark’s essential oil contains many of the same compounds found in pine, eucalyptus, citrus, rosemary, cloves, thyme, savory, and black pepper, making it attractive not just as a flavoring but as a bass note in perfumes as well.

  The cascarilla tree is native to the West Indies and was described by Europeans in the late eighteenth century as part of a wave of botanical exploration. Any aromatic tree bark from the New World was being evaluated for its medicinal possibilities; this one was put to use in bitters and tonics of all kinds. It was originally described as a silver-barked tree, but botanists soon realized that the white color came from lichen that colonizes the tree. Under the lichen is a dark, corky bark that was used as a brown dye. Tiny sprays of pinkish white flowers and dark, glossy leaves make the tree an attractive specimen, but like other members of the spurge family (including poinsettia) the sap can be very irritating to handle.

  Cascarilla bark continues to be an important ingredient in bitters and vermouth, and is rumored to flavor Campari as well. It has long been an additive to tobacco; when cigarette makers were required to disclose their ingredients in 1989, cascarilla was still on the list.

  CINCHONA

  Cinchona spp.

  rubiaceae (madder family)

  No tree has had a more important role in the history of cocktails than this South American species. The quinine extracted from cinchona bark doesn’t just flavor tonics, bitters, aromatized wines, and other spirits. It also saved the world from malaria and put botanists and plant hunters at the center of several global wars.

  Twenty-three different trees and shrubs make up the Cinchona genus, most of them sporting dark, glossy leaves and white or pink tubular, fragrant flowers visited by hummingbirds and butterflies. The reddish brown bark was used as a medicine by Andean tribes. They treated fevers and heart problems with it, and perhaps malaria—although some historians believe that malaria was introduced to South America by Europeans, who had suffered from it for centuries.

  Jesuit priests discovered its efficacy against malaria in 1650, but it was a half century before Europeans grasped the importance of the bitter powder and started sending ships to South America to load up on felled trees. The locals were understandably concerned about the plunder of their forests and worked together to conceal the location of the trees.

  Not every species of cinchona yields a potent dose of quinine, and botanical literature is full of misidentifications and misnamings of the trees. In 1854, a gorgeous book called Quinologie was published in Paris with hand-colored plates illustrating the different varieties so that pharmacists could tell the types of bark apart. We now know that Cinchona pubescens supplies the highest dose, as does C. calisaya and a few hybrids. While it may seem that C. officinalis, with its official-sounding name, would be the standard for quinine production, it actually contains very little of the drug.

  Figuring this out was not easy for European explorers wandering the jungle, often in a fever themselves. One noted character in the quinine drama was a British merchant named Charles Ledger. In the 1860s, he sold a collection of seeds to the British government, but they turned out to yield little quinine. He hired a Bolivian man named Manuel Incra Mamani to gather more seed for him, but Mamani was captured by local officials. As Ledger himself described it: “Poor Manuel is dead also; he was put in prison by the Corregidor of Coroico, beaten so as to make him confess who the seed found on him was for; after being confined in prison for some twenty days, beaten and half starved, he was set at liberty, robbed of his donkeys, blankets and everything he had, dying very soon after.”

  Manuel did, however, manage to ship some seed to Ledger. By this point the British government would have no more of Ledger’s schemes, so he instead sold them to the Dutch for the equivalent of twenty dollars. The Dutch sent them to Java, where they already had a long history of controlling spice plantations. Unlike the seeds Ledger sold to the British, these seeds proved viable, and soon the Dutch had a global monopoly. They developed an alternative to logging the trees: they would strip the bark and then wrap the trunk in moss to heal the wound so it could regenerate.

  Everything changed in World War II, when Japanese troops took control of Java and Germans seized a quinine warehouse in Amsterdam. The last American plane to fly out of the Philippines before Japanese control carried four million quinine seeds—but the trees could not be grown fast enough to provide malaria remedies to Allied troops.

  A desperate search for a synthetic alternative was under way, but meanwhile, American botanist Raymond Fosberg was sent by the USDA to South America to find more quinine. He traced the routes of the old explorers and managed to acquire 12.5 million pounds of bark to ship home—but it wasn’t enough. One night in Columbia, Fosberg heard a knock at the door and discovered Nazi agents ready to make a deal. They’d followed him through South America and wanted to offer for sale a supply of pure quinine they’d smuggled from Germany. He didn’t have to debate long before accepting their offer. American troops needed the drug if they were to keep fighting—even if it came from corrupt Nazis.

  From its beginning as a medicine, one difficulty with quinine was its bitter taste. Mixing it with soda water, and perhaps a bit of sugar, was helpful. British colonists realized that adding a splash of gin improved the medicine considerably, and the gin and tonic was born. Quinine also became an important ingredient in bitters, herbal liqueurs, and vermouth. Byrrh (pronounced “beer”) is a mixture of wine and quinine; Maurin Quina is a white wine aperitif infused with quinine, wild cherries, lemon, and cherry brandy. Italian aperitifs such as China Martini and Liquore Elixir di China are also quinine-based, as is the Spanish citrus liqueur Calisay. A wide range of quinine-infused aperitif wines are coming on the market or enjoying a renaissance; all of them are worth exploring.

  Perhaps one of the loveliest uses of quinine in a drink c
an be found in a bottle of Lillet, a wine infused with citrus, herbs and a bit of quinine. Lillet, available in blanc, rosé, and rouge styles, is best enjoyed like wine, chilled in a glass, preferably while sitting in a French sidewalk café in spring—but bartenders are putting it to good use in cocktails as well.

  THE MAMANI GIN & TONIC

  Jalapeños and tomatoes, two South American natives, pay tribute to Manuel Incra Mamani, the man who lost everything to bring quinine to the rest of the world.

  1½ ounces gin (try Aviation or Hendrick’s)

  1 jalapeño (or, if you prefer, a milder pepper), seeded, cored, and sliced

  2 to 3 sprigs fresh cilantro or basil

  1 cucumber (1 chunk and 1 swizzle-stick-shape slice needed)

  High-quality tonic (look for a brand without high-fructose corn syrup, like Fever-Tree or Q Tonic)

  3 red or orange cherry tomatoes

  In a cocktail shaker, muddle the gin with 2 slices of the jalapeño, 1 sprig of cilantro, and the chunk of cucumber.