Farm-to-Glass Cocktails with Flavorful Shrubs and Bitters
CrushBrew Editorial · Food & Spirits · 7 min read
Shrubs and bitters have moved from obscure cocktail-bar curiosity to something you can find on almost any serious drinks menu — and a Hudson Valley producer named The Hudson Standard was among the American craft companies that made that happen. Founded by Marianne Courville in 2014, The Hudson Standard built its reputation on small-batch shrubs and bitters made from locally foraged Hudson Valley ingredients and colonial-era recipes. The company has since closed, but the story of how it started — and what shrubs and bitters actually are — is worth understanding if you want to drink more intentionally.
Key Takeaways
Shrubs are vinegar-based drinking syrups with a 300-year history — tart, sweet, and designed to be mixed with water, soda, or spirits. They fell out of use when refrigeration made fruit preservation unnecessary; the craft cocktail movement brought them back.
Bitters are concentrated botanical extracts made by infusing herbs, barks, roots, and spices in grain alcohol. A few dashes alter the flavor of a cocktail the way seasoning alters food — they’re not an ingredient you taste on their own so much as one you miss when it’s absent.
The Hudson Standard was a pioneer of the Hudson Valley shrub revival — Marianne Courville’s company, founded in 2014 after a Kickstarter campaign, built one of the early artisan bitters-and-shrubs brands around locally sourced and foraged ingredients and colonial American recipes.
Shrubs work without alcohol — mixed with soda water, a shrub makes a sophisticated non-alcoholic drink that holds its own at any bar. Their acidity also makes them useful in cooking, particularly with duck, pork, and as a base for vinaigrettes.
The Hudson Valley remains a hub for this tradition — the craft bitters and shrub movement Courville helped build continues through other producers in the region and nationally, and the Hudson Valley’s agricultural base makes it a natural home for ingredient-first producers.
In This Article
What Is a Shrub?
Not the plant. In the context of cocktails and drinks, a shrub is a vinegar-based drinking syrup — the product of macerating fruit in vinegar, straining out the solids, and mixing the resulting liquid with a sweetener like sugar or honey until it becomes a concentrated syrup. The flavor is tart, sweet, and deeply fruity, with the vinegar providing the same kind of brightness that citrus juice adds to a cocktail, but with greater complexity and a longer shelf life.
Definition
Shrub (drinking vinegar)
A concentrated syrup made by infusing fruit in vinegar — typically apple cider vinegar — and then mixing with a sweetener to balance the acidity. Shrubs are used as cocktail mixers (replacing or augmenting citrus), stirred into soda water as a non-alcoholic drink, or used in cooking. There are two historical types: the cold-process shrub (fruit left to macerate in vinegar for days before straining) and the hot-process shrub (fruit cooked with vinegar and sugar). Both produce tart, complex, intensely fruity syrups.
The shrub sits at the intersection of beverage and condiment. At a bar, a few tablespoons stirred into club soda makes a sophisticated, low-alcohol drink with the complexity of a good mocktail. A splash in a whiskey cocktail adds brightness and depth the way bitters do. In the kitchen, a shrub’s acidity and fruit character make it a natural in vinaigrettes, glazes for duck or pork, and anywhere a recipe calls for both acid and fruit flavor simultaneously.
Where Do Shrubs Come From?
The shrub has a longer history than most people expect. The American version traces back to 17th-century England, where vinegar served as a practical substitute for citrus juice — scarcer and more expensive — in preserving seasonal berries and stone fruits for use through the winter. The practice crossed the Atlantic with the colonists. By the 19th century, American shrub recipes were well established: vinegar poured over fruit (usually berries), left to infuse for anywhere from overnight to several days, the fruit strained out, and the liquid sweetened and reduced to a syrup.
How It Works
Making a cold-process shrub
Fruit is combined with apple cider vinegar and left to infuse — at The Hudson Standard, this ran from ten days to two weeks. The fruit is then strained out, and the remaining vinegar — now saturated with fruit flavor — is mixed with sugar or honey until a syrup forms. The cold-process method preserves the fresh, raw character of the fruit better than cooking does. The resulting syrup is shelf-stable without refrigeration until opened, owing to the vinegar’s natural antimicrobial properties.
Shrubs fell out of fashion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for a completely mundane reason: home refrigeration made fruit preservation unnecessary. You could simply keep fresh fruit cold rather than pickling it in vinegar. The shrub became a historical curiosity — until the craft cocktail movement revived it, starting around 2010 in American restaurants and bars. Bartenders rediscovered that vinegar-based shrubs brought an acidity and complexity to drinks that no other ingredient quite replicated. By 2012, shrubs were appearing on serious cocktail menus nationwide, and small producers were beginning to bottle and sell them commercially.
What Are Bitters and How Are They Different from Shrubs?
Most people know bitters — or at least know Angostura, the amber-brown bottle with the oversized paper label that lives behind virtually every bar in the world. But bitters as a category is far broader than any single brand, and understanding how they differ from shrubs clarifies how each is used.
Definition
Cocktail bitters
A highly concentrated botanical extract made by infusing herbs, barks, roots, spices, or citrus peel in high-proof grain alcohol. Unlike shrubs — which are fruit-based, sweet-tart, and used in tablespoon quantities — bitters are intensely bitter (hence the name), used in drop or dash quantities, and function as flavor seasoning rather than flavor ingredient. A few dashes can transform a cocktail the way a pinch of salt transforms food. Their medicinal origins date to ancient cultures; bitters were sold as digestive aids and tonics before becoming bar staples in the early 19th century.
Shrubs vs. Bitters — Key Differences
| Factor | Shrub | Bitters |
|---|---|---|
| Base | Apple cider vinegar | High-proof grain alcohol |
| Primary ingredients | Fruit, vinegar, sweetener | Herbs, barks, roots, spices, botanicals |
| Flavor profile | Tart, sweet, fruity | Bitter, aromatic, intensely concentrated |
| Quantity used | 1–3 tablespoons per drink | A few drops or dashes |
| Role in a drink | Primary ingredient; provides acidity and fruit | Seasoning; adds complexity and depth |
| Works without alcohol? | Yes — excellent in soda water | Technically yes, but rarely used that way |
The easiest way to understand the difference in practice: think of a shrub as the juice component of a cocktail — it provides fruit flavor, acidity, and body in meaningful volume. Bitters are more like a spice — you use very little, they’re not the point of the drink, but they make the drink more itself. Both can appear in the same cocktail, serving different functions simultaneously.
The Hudson Standard: A Pioneer of the American Shrub Revival
The Hudson Standard was founded in 2014 by Marianne Courville, who co-owned Hudson Wine Merchants in Hudson, New York, with her husband Michael Albin. The company was born from a Kickstarter campaign and built around a conviction that the Hudson Valley’s agricultural bounty — its orchards, farms, and foraged botanicals — was the right base for a line of artisan shrubs and bitters.
Courville’s interest in shrubs had been building since 2012, when the trend began appearing in American restaurants and bars. She recognized that shrubs were naturally suited to locally sourced ingredients — the vinegar-based preservation method amplified seasonal fruit flavors rather than masking them. Late in 2013, she created her first batch: a pear honey ginger shrub using young ginger and pears from local farms, paired with a ginger bitters. The infusion took about four weeks. It sold out quickly.
The Process
How The Hudson Standard sourced its ingredients
Courville used apple cider vinegar from an orchard in the Finger Lakes, sourcing in bulk for consistency. For fruit, she sought what she called “orphaned” orchards — pick-your-own operations where the fruit is unsprayed and unhurried. Shrubs infused for ten days to two weeks before the fruit was strained out. The grain alcohol base for the bitters also came from a New York State source. The company’s approach was defined by agricultural traceability at every step: knowing where the ingredient came from, and choosing suppliers who treated their land the same way Courville treated her recipes — with care and without shortcuts.
The first retail lineup in 2014 included Strawberry Rhubarb, Apple Coriander Maple, and Pear Ginger shrubs, along with Spruce Shoots Bitters, Ginger Bitters, and Hudson Valley Celery Bitters. The following year brought Cassis Berry Shrub — black currants and blackberries in vinegar with organic sugar, offering layered tartness with undertones of chocolate and jam — and Love Struck Bitters, inspired by an ancient Roman aphrodisiac formula using hyssop, thyme, peppercorn, and ginger. The packaging was designed by Hudson-based artist John Isaacs — simple amber bottles with a village outline drawing that, in Isaacs’ own description, contained no “gratuitous embellishment.”
The Hudson Standard has since closed. But its decade as a working business helped establish the commercial vocabulary for what a Hudson Valley shrub producer could be — small batch, ingredient-led, traceable from orchard to bottle, and rooted in recipes that predated the cocktail culture that ultimately found them again.
How Do You Use Shrubs and Bitters?
Both shrubs and bitters are broadly useful — more so than most people realize when they first encounter them. They’re not specialty items that only work in craft cocktails; they’re ingredients with genuine range.
Frequently Asked Questions About Shrubs and Bitters
🍶 Shrubs and Bitters — Quick Reference
What they are, where they come from, and how to use them
| Topic | Shrub | Bitters |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Vinegar-based fruit syrup | Concentrated botanical alcohol extract |
| Origin | 17th-c. England; colonial America | Ancient medicinal tradition; early 19th-c. cocktails |
| Key ingredients | Fruit, apple cider vinegar, sweetener | Herbs, barks, roots, spices, grain alcohol |
| Infusion time | 10 days–2 weeks (cold process) | Days to weeks depending on botanicals |
| Flavor | Tart, sweet, fruity | Bitter, aromatic, intensely concentrated |
| Amount used per drink | 1–3 tablespoons | A few drops or dashes |
| Role in a drink | Primary ingredient (acidity + fruit) | Seasoning (complexity + depth) |
| Alcohol-free? | Yes — great in soda water | Alcohol-based; trace amounts per dash |
| Works in cooking? | Yes — vinaigrettes, glazes, sauces | Yes — desserts, sauces, marinades |
| The Hudson Standard | Pioneer Hudson Valley producer, founded 2014 by Marianne Courville; Kickstarter-funded; locally sourced ingredients; now closed. Flavors included Pear Ginger, Strawberry Rhubarb, Cassis Berry (shrubs) and Ginger, Celery, Love Struck (bitters). | |
