Embrace the duo’s possibilities with three exemplary recommendations.

Time flies when you’re thirsty. It has somehow, impossibly, been five years since I wrote the piece in which I argued forcefully for the many-splendored delights of combining sparkling water with a dash—or five—of cocktail bitters.

The market availability in both these product categories has gone gonzo here in the third decade of the 21st century, the great seltzer boom (“c’est La Croix”) of the late 2010s bouncing happily off the ongoing vogue for bitters of every stripe and extraction as an essential component to the modern cocktail bar. At a place like Amor y Amargo in New York’s East Village—still the best bitters bar in America, 15 years on—one can delight in a full-spectrum ROYGBIV color wheel of dasher bottles in every possible flavor and tone, and online webshops like Bitters & Bottles offer more than 150 selections, all shippable to your door.

It seemed like we were primed for a new golden era of the bitters and soda, a sterling epoch for which I was chuffed to serve as the great big booming town cryer. Bitters and soda is good, I proclaimed! Surely this not-a-cocktail but also definitely-a-cocktail was primed to take the post-pandemic drinking milieu by storm!

Well—lived history has a way of making fools of us all. Verily the nonalcoholic drinking trend boomed voluminously over the last five years, in sales and cultural cachet and investment year-over-year on-trend alpha throughput yada yada, but nearly all of that has been predicated on developing a new lexicon of elixirs and potions and adaptogenic tonics and herbal decoctions and assorted nöotropic nostrums. Our drinking moment represents a veritable buffet bar of salad days for the N/A beer industry, in particular; it is the only segment of beer as an entire beverage sector with anything like positive growth. People even keep trying to make N/A wine happen (which feels very fetch to me). Perhaps the only node or category of N/A drinks that has not gone absolutely gonzo parabolic in terms of sales and interest and TikTok meta-performance is my beloved soda bitters.

I would like to state for the record that everyone is wrong about this. I think there’s a couple of reasons why soda bitters has yet to properly #trend online and in bars: the hegemonic mono-control of mineral water in America in the hands of a certain very large and deeply monied supercorporation, for starters; but also the emotional and psychological connectivity cocktail bitters have to the (gulp) Golden Age of Cocktails Revival, a time of great millennial promise, an era of filament light bulbs and L Train boltholes and suspenders a-go-go and much earnest shaking from behind the bar. Cocktail bitters did not, in fact, go out of style with neo-Balkan indie folk; it remains a thriving category with many new entrants and myriad applications from the bar to the kitchen to the bottle of bubble water. But there’s always going to be some who associate it with fussy cocktails alone, much to their own detriment.

I recommended some really delicious soda bitters combos back in 2021, and I’m glad to do it again here now in 2026. This remains the superlative end-all be-all of stylish N/A drinking, at home or as a call-out in the bar, and my greatest dream would be for more bars and drinkers to embrace the possibilities. The water you use matters, the bitters you use matter, and the results can be astonishingly delicious.

Rambler with Hull & Bay Key Lime Bitters

There’s no mineral water I’ve drank more of in the last five years than Rambler, a canned, ready-to-drink option out of Austin, Texas, that uses a proprietary mineralization blend to produce sparkling water of great creaminess and complexity. (I once drank 20 of these in a very hot weekend at Hot Luck, and only just survived.) Rambler’s line of waters includes flavored options, but my strong preference is to purchase the original unflavored offering and plus it up myself at home. Hull & Bay is a new-ish bitters company (launched in 2024), and it hails from Tampa, Florida—the land of the key lime. There’s a wonderful lime-and-cream thing happening with these bitters, which one assumes are purposed for myriad tiki destinies in the hands of most bars, but it makes a really delicious foil for the mineral creaminess of the Rambler. I add Hull & Bay’s Key Lime Bitters directly into the can, almost like a tropical Michelada.

Mondariz with Dr. Adam’s Spanish Bitters

Mondariz is a mineral water from Galicia, renowned for its clean, balanced taste and clarity. It’s one of my favorite waters to drink alongside wine (you should be drinking mineral water next to wine) and one of my favorite mineral waters to serve with food (you should be drinking mineral water alongside food) because it compliments without overpowering, and refreshes the palate between each bite or sip. But I think it’s fun to let the bitters do the driving, and so I’ve started reaching for the little ochre-yellow bottle of Dr. Adam’s Spanish Bitters, a product from Scotland that has earned a serious following in the bar world over the last decade and a half (it’s surprisingly versatile stuff, and can be plugged into everything from a Margarita to a flip to a Hot Toddy). The flavors here are based on a 19th-century recipe, and offer layers and layers of complexity: There’s chamomile and violets, but also tobacco and leather, citrus peel and coriander... it all just keeps going and going on the palate. This is ideal to build a true cocktail-style drink around: Stack your highball cubes, be generous with the bitters, and fill to the top with Mondariz before stirring with a metal spoon.

Jermuk with Dram Hair of the Dog

Mineral water has long been prized for its curative properties; in some parts of the world, like Germany, certain mineral waters are quite literally prescribed as medicine. I have been known to desire a remedial corrective myself from time to time (what with all the professional drinks reporting research I’m required to perform) and have come to lean on this very combination as the perfect morning-after drop. Jermuk is a terrific natural mineral water from Armenia, with high levels of total dissolved solids (TDS) including magnesium, potassium, and calcium. The water has a notably weighted mouthfeel, and to me tastes a little “green,” though some of that may be the influence of the brand’s dark green bottles. This pairs well with the bitters designed for hangovers from Colorado’s Dram, which feature an array of herbs and spices including ginger, fennel, and cinnamon. My most beloved application occurs thusly: 10 drops of Dram into a bottle of Jermuk, go to the gym, walk for 45 minutes at an incline on the treadmill, then sit in the steam room and drink the entire bottle of Jermuk with bitters over the course of 10 minutes, after which I’m fresh as a wee daisy.

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