Brooklyn Hemispherical Bitters fresh local ingredients

I’ve known Simon Lange, chef at Apartment 138 (138 Smith Street in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn), since he played high school soccer with my kid brother in Key West. When I first was getting interested in bitters a couple years ago, we took a road trip to Maine for another kid brother’s wedding. In our friends Mark & Nan’s rental mini-van we caravaned from Manhattan to Northern Maine. I was packing a small kit of bitters-Angostura, Fee Brother’s Rhubarb and the very rare, not-even-supposed-to-exist Beefeater 24 Bitters. (Note to fellow bitters makers (and self): more gin-based bitters.). A half gallon of Sprite was transformed into Spitters with the addition of some Angostura, and we were sure we were onto something. At a Friendly’s in Northern Connecticut we all really went for it on the milkshake front, and Simon and I added bitters to ours. I think we wound up with a blend of Ango and Fee’s Rhubarb, and it was pretty damn exciting.

Flash forward 4 years, and Simon’s put together a rather more complex version of that bitters shake. Simon was further experimenting with ice cream and bitters while cheffing at Apartment 138  while Mark & I were first developing our bitters, and I’d pass on some tests for shake experiments. But it was when I got my first good whiff of the Black Mission Figs that had been soaking in a bitters base for 10 days that I thought to use the actual botanical-in this case the figs-with ice cream. I packed a mason jar with a few super-saturated figs in a mason jar and took them to Simon. A few weeks later I stopped by and he’d come up with the fig shake and put it on the menu. He’d mixed some honey chestnut Il Laboratorio di Gelato, about 3 oz Old Forrester’s Rye and one hyper-bittered fig in a blender. A graham cracker from One Girl Cookies rests as a garnish on the lip of a pint glass.  Best shared, probably, as two sips in you immediately start to enter a luxurious fat, sugar, fig, bitters & Rye comaphoria. ”And it all started on that trip,” Simon reflected when I stopped by to shoot some photos of the beast.