King Floyd's Cardamom Bitters 100ml bottles

King Floyd's Bitters was founded by Lawrence Floyd Batterton, who began hand-crafting cocktail bitters for friends and the bartending community in San Francisco in 2013before launching the brand commercially in January of 2017. The name draws on Batterton's father, from whom his middle name is taken, along with a nod to Emperor Norton, the self-proclaimed Emperor of San Francisco's Barbary Coast era. The operation is now based in Novato, California, where botanicals are extracted using either corn-based, high-proof neutral grain spirit or deionized, UV-filtered water.

Cardamom Bitters is built around a careful balance of spicy cardamom aroma and the fiery bite of ginger root, extracted through the brand's signature slow process. Herbs and spices are ground by hand, then percolated and macerated for up to two months to draw out their full character, with the mixture tasted daily as it develops before final filtering and bottling. The finished bitters are bottled at 45% ABV, concentrated enough that a small dash carries real impact in a glass.

On the nose and palate, this bottling leans into warming baking spice paired with vivacious green cardamom, with the ginger root adding a sharper, almost peppery heat underneath. It reads as a fairly focused, single-note bitters rather than a fruit-forward blend, giving it a clean, aromatic lift that plays well with a wide range of base spirits and lets the cardamom character come through clearly in the finished drink.