We love gingerbread. Well, to be specific, we love the the sort of ginger cookies that we used to get at the Christmas markets in cities throughout Germany and Northern Europe. In Norway, these ginger cookies were called pepperkaker… or pepper cakes.

Of course, nothing can beat having access to fresh ginger juice when you’re making a cocktail – but it isn’t something that most people have laying around their kitchen, and if you do make ginger juice, it starts to lose its flavor almost immediately. By using a combination of dried gingers and alcohol, we’ve been able to create a shelf-stable ginger bitter that can bring that bite to warming winter cocktails – especially those made with rum and bourbon – yet also work beautifully in classic bucks and mules. In fact, 10 drops in a Moscow Mule turns it into something special.

Back in 2011, we added these bitters into our experimental series as the Peppercake Bitters, but stopped making them a couple of years later. We’ve tweaked the bitters to make them a little gingersnappier, and are bringing them back as our Buckspice Gingersnap Bitters.