“I could walk out on the sidewalk outside the bar and do a maceration of the weeds in the cracks and call it a fernet,” Billy Sunday partner Alex Bachman is quoted as saying in the new book Amaro: The Spirited World of Bittersweet, Herbal Liqueurs (Ten Speed Press). Author Brad Thomas Parsons, who also wrote Bitters: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All, aims to demystify amaro—a difficult task since there’s no legal definition of amaro and, while it’s most often associated with Italy, it can be made anywhere. Parsons explains in the book, “Generally speaking, amaro refers to the collective class of Italian-made aromatic, herbal, bittersweet liqueurs traditionally served as a digestif after a meal. Amari are created by macerating and/or distilling bitter barks, herbs, seeds, spices, citrus peels, flowers, and other botanicals in a neutral spirit or wine that is then sweetened with a sugar syrup.”
What drew Bachman to amaro, though, wasn’t the idea of giving it to children as medicine, but his background in wine. “What I loved in wine was the idea of terroir, that the taste and smell of where these things are from makes these wines so distinctive,” Bachman says. “Whiskey has a sense of place, but the basic science of distillation strips out a lot of the congers and flavor profiles you’ll find in wine, where it’s just fermented, not distilled. Amaro, to me, had the best of both worlds.”
