Rhubarb is one of my favorite cocktail ingredients. When rhubarb season arrived, I ran to buy as much as I could from the market that's usually first to get all the seasonal produce. When I couldn't find it, I went to the manager in a panic. "We used to stock that," he said. "But nobody likes it, so we stopped." I then dramatically flung myself onto the nearest support beam and screamed, "Noooooo!" as if I just found out Darth Vader was my father. (He is not.) Luckily, the next store had a whole display of rhubarb and promised me that they would keep stocking it throughout the season. More

Bitters are often thought of as the salt and pepper of the cocktail world, adding just a touch of spice to focus and deepen the flavors of a drink. It makes sense to use them sparingly—a 4-ounce bottle of Angostura can sell for $9 or more, and it's potent stuff, so a drop or two goes a long way. "But we're living in an age of extreme ingredients," says Theo Lieberman of Lantern's Keep and Milk & Honey in NYC, "everywhere you look, there's pork belly." So perhaps the time for the extreme use of bitters has come. More

Every ingredient that conceivably can be made in-house is made in-house at Yusho in Chicago's Logan Square. Alex Bachman has put together a broad and endlessly enticing debut menu for Yusho that pays homage to several classics while also striving to break new ground. Here are 4 drinks we loved (plus the recipes to make them yourself!) More

Orange bitters are basically my cocktail Superman. When I've screwed up a drink by making it too sweet or gotten so close to perfection only to end up with something flat-tasting, orange bitters have swooped in to save the day. Just a drop or two can add the right depth or bridge together ingredients that aren't quite living up to their mixological potential. But orange bitters are so much more than a way to fix a bad drink—they're an essential part of so many balanced cocktails because of their deep, citrusy, spicy, and complex flavor. More

Part history, part project guide, and part recipe book, Bitters: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All with Cocktails, Recipes & Formulas manages to do what most do not: wrap up centuries worth of information about a single subject into one book you'll be eager to dig in and out of. Read on to learn more and win a copy of your own. More

Mojitos are such a refreshing way to chase the sticky morning heat; but if you're like me, the last thing you want is a big mouthful of yard clippings every time you take a sip. And lot of mojitos are so cloying that they leave me even thirstier, rather than slaking a sticky throat the way a proper cocktail should. Clearly this wheel, while not needing reinvention, needed a little tuning. More

We find ourselves now in a sort of orange bitters renaissance, but it was by no means ever clear that this would happen. It's truly instructive to take each brand—Fee's, Regan's, Bitter Truth, and Angostura—and test each of them in cocktails. Even in a small dose, a dash, each brand asserts its personality. More

These days, you can't move a millimeter in even the dingiest of contemporary drink dens without hearing that "B" word: bitters, bitters, bitters. But what are bitters really made of? And how can you go about crafting your own? More

Last week, we dipped into a little bitters history. Today we'll look at the two champions of the bitters field: Angostura and Peychaud's. More

Bitters originally were formulated by physicians (or quacks posing as such) in the 1700s and sold as medicinal tonics. The idea was to take herbs and spices, preserve them in alcohol, and market them as a remedy for circulation or digestion disorders. By 1806, the word cocktail was already in use to describe a mix of spirits, water, sugar, and bitters. More