Bitter Giuseppe

An amaro-forward stirred cocktail featuring Cynar as the base, accented by vermouth, citrus, and bitters.

The Bitter Giuseppe was created by Stephen Cole at The Violet Hour in Chicago around 2007, under circumstances that were as accidental as any great cocktail origin. The Violet Hour had opened on North Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago that same year, founded by Paul McGee and Toby Maloney as one of the city's defining craft cocktail establishments, and Cole was one of its early bartenders. When an Italian chef came to the bar and asked for a drink, Cole improvised with Cynar as the base spirit — a choice that was, as he later described it, essentially insane by the standards of the time. Cynar, the artichoke-based Italian amaro first produced in Venice in 1952 by Angelo Dalle Molle, was used in bars as a modifier, not a primary component; building a drink around it as the featured spirit had no precedent. Cole paired the Cynar with sweet vermouth, creating something in the structure of a low-ABV Manhattan. It was too sweet. The conventional correction would have been whiskey, but instead Cole added fresh lemon juice — a choice equally without precedent in stirred, all-spirit cocktails, where citrus was reserved for shaken sour-style drinks. His inspiration, as he later recounted in The Bartender's Manifesto (2022), was the Ti' Punch's use of a lime disc in an otherwise spirit-only drink. The resulting cocktail established Cynar as an essential cocktail ingredient and, according to its advocates, is the direct ancestor of virtually every Cynar-based cocktail that followed.