All The Bitter

The couple met working as sommeliers at The French Laundry in Napa Valley. When they had children and stopped drinking, they found themselves with finely tuned palates, a shared interest in cocktail craft, and a problem: the bitters that make a good Old Fashioned or Manhattan actually contain a meaningful amount of alcohol. Every drop counts for people who are genuinely alcohol-free. Ian spotted an empty non-alcoholic whiskey bottle one day in 2020, wondered why the same logic couldn't apply to bitters, and dropped out of a real estate course three days in to find out.

All The Bitter uses vegetable-derived glycerin rather than alcohol as the extraction base. The result is a 0.0% ABV bitter that functions the same way as the traditional kind — a few dashes to balance sweetness, add depth, round out a cocktail — without compromising the zero-proof commitment. The botanicals are whole and organic: cinnamon, clove, allspice, ginger, dandelion root, gentian root, and cinchona bark in the aromatic range, with other expressions drawing on regional flavour traditions. Each small batch is made by hand at their production space in Chico, California, which also houses a bottle shop that opened in 2025.

The range covers the core cocktail bitters categories. The Old Fashioned Aromatic is the flagship: warm, spiced, built for stirred drinks. New Orleans Spiced Cherry nods to the Creole cocktail tradition. Coffee & Cherry works across both mocktail and full-spirit builds. The focus is on bitters as a supporting ingredient — something that makes other drinks better, whether alcoholic or not — rather than as a hero product.

Distribution has grown from a home kitchen experiment to several hundred stockists across the US, with international presence in Europe, Japan, and the Gulf. The brand ships worldwide and is available through specialist AF retailers in the UK. Each order still includes a toy dinosaur, a tradition that started with their kids and stuck.