Edible Blue Ridge Summer 2022

MOVERS & SHAKERS

The Roots of Mixology

Grant Kittrell

Courtesy of Blackwater Bitters

WORDS

PHOTOS

more creative.” Companies like Blackwater Bitters encouraged individuals to reimagine and expand their relationships with the kitchen pantry, the home bar, and ultimately with their local community. Just a small selection of home bitters, for instance, can afford customers a great deal of agency in the culinary

A great cocktail contains multitudes. With the right ingredients, even the simplest recipe can conjure a host of times, places, people, and stories. Such a mixture can be grounding, humbling even, and equally nostalgic. Of course, not all cocktails are made alike, so if your home ingredients are falling a bit short, it might be time to reconnect with your roots — literal roots. Blackwater Bitters of Lynchburg, VA may have just what you need to get started. Christy Christmas and Katie Elliott have been blazing this trail for local drinkers since 2016, when they stumbled into the delicious art of making bitters. After preparing a (surprisingly popular) batch of coffee bitters for holiday gifts one season, the team began experimenting with other ingredients — like ginger, chamomile, and lavender — to take the everyday cocktail to new heights, and they’ve been elevating the region’s drinking (and drink making ) experience ever since.

process when they see themselves as central players in their own creations. Christmas and Elliott seem to steep this creative spirit into each bitter, and the proof is in the bottle — and in local demand. e team was surprised to find such a strong appetite for their product in Lynchburg, VA, particularly given its historically-conservative leanings. “ ere was a niche to be filled,” Elliott noted. And the team has filled it quite well, steeping and stirring up a host of ingredients into their amber, tincture-sized bottles. But keeping up with demand hasn’t always been easy, especially since each bitters can require its own unique set of resources (cue the culinary torch). Moreover, the Blackwater team has, quite impressively, balanced production with a host of other “hustles” — full-time jobs and educational pursuits to name just a couple. When asked what was next for their business, Christmas said they’d be honing their energies into a few of their best sellers — like cedar, orange, and lavender — and stirring up new seasonal extracts along the way. For those who’d rather leave all the experimenting up to their local bartender, Blackwater Bitters have found a home at many of the region’s most beloved restaurants, including Grey’s, e Dahlia, and Dish in Lynchburg, VA, and Machete in Greensboro, NC. If you are looking to mix things up a bit, Christmas and Elliott offer up a number of bitter friendly recipes on their website. Here’s one for those warm, sundrenched afternoons ahead.

e cocktail, in its most basic form, requires just a short list of ingredients: spirits, sugar, and bitters. But some contemporary cocktails stray pretty far from this faithful

trinity. Christmas framed this quite bluntly: “People put too much shit in them.” Blackwater Bitters, on the other hand, offers an earthy alternative to the highly processed, mass-produced, pre-packaged “cocktails” found on many store shelves. But what makes a good bitters? Well, it depends on which herb, spice, flower, fruit, bark, leaf, or root you ask, but it’s usually some combination of these botanical elements steeped, strained, cooked, and sweetened into a highly concentrated, highly-flavorful alcoholic mixture. And while some bitters are pretty straightforward, others require a little more time, prep, and … perhaps a little grit. Blackwater’s very popular cedar bitters, for instance, involves smoking wood chips with a culinary torch — quite the commitment for your average drinker. Luckily, customers can pick up where the Blackwater team leaves off, without risking a second degree burn. Indeed, over the last year or so, as COVID restrictions made dining out difficult, Blackwater Bitters offered local drinkers (of cocktails and mocktails alike) a way to safely explore their inner mixologists from the refuge of their own homes. “Instead of going out to the bar,” Elliott noted in an interview, “people were staying home and being

Photos by Nathan McDonald

26 | EDIBLE BLUE RIDGE SUMMER 2022