Trinidad Sour

Angostura bitters as the base spirit, with orgeat, lemon, and rye — González's 2009 Clover Club inversion of bitters-as-seasoning, now an IBA Contemporary Classic.

The Trinidad Sour was created by bartender Giuseppe González while working at the Clover Club in Brooklyn, New York, in 2009 — and represents one of the most daring and successful violations of cocktail convention in the modern craft era. The Clover Club, opened in 2008 by Julie Reiner and partners on Smith Street in Carroll Gardens, was one of Brooklyn's defining craft cocktail destinations, and González was its head bartender. He conceived the drink partly in response to Italian bartender Valentino Bolognese's competition-winning Trinidad Especial, which used an unusually large measure of Angostura bitters with pisco and lime. González submitted his Angostura-forward riff — 1.5 ounces of Angostura as the primary spirit, balanced with 1 ounce of orgeat, 0.75 ounces of fresh lemon juice, and 0.5 ounces of rye — to a cocktail competition and lost. He then began making it for bartender colleagues, who championed it to their guests, and its reputation spread through slow accumulation rather than immediate acclaim. Angostura bitters, developed by German physician Dr. Johann Gottlieb Benjamin Siegert in 1824 in the Venezuelan town of Angostura (now Ciudad Bolívar) as a digestive tonic, had been used in cocktails exclusively in dashes since the 19th century; González's inversion of this convention — treating the bitters as a base spirit while reducing the whiskey to a minor supporting role — produced a paradoxically balanced drink. The IBA recognizes it as a Contemporary Classic.