Ever since the cocktail was a thing, bartenders have relied on a potent product known as Angostura Bitters. This is that stuff usually found in a tiny bottle with an oversized label and a yellow cap that your resident mixologist uses often but in small quantities. Angostura Bitters, like most esoteric cocktail ingredients, began its life as a 19th century tonic used for a wide variety of things it mostly wasn't actually capable of treating. No doctor worth a damn would ever prescribe this stuff for anything these days, but it's still the key ingredient in a lot of awesome drinks. Honestly, these days I'm surprised when my favorite bar doesn't include at least a few drops in a recipe. What a lot of people don't know is that the world very nearly lost this treasure forever.

Back in 2009, the global economic crisis was hitting hard. As bad as things were (and still are) in America and throughout Europe, Caribbean island nations were reduced to day-to-day struggle. The House of Angostura in Trinidad and Tobago very nearly went under. They more or less ceased producing their trademark bitters for around a year, resulting in a world-wide shortage that put a lot of bars and cocktail enthusiasts on edge.

The problem is that there are only a handful of people in the entire world who know the full recipe for Angostura Bitters and they all belong to the House thereof. It's a trade secret more heavily guarded than the chemistry of Coca Cola, one of the last bastions of the classic cocktail arcana. It's such a valuable property that there's no guarantee the recipe would survive the collapse of House Angostura. We almost witnessed such a collapse in our lifetime.

Granted, someone could probably concoct a vague approximation of Angostura Bitters. We know that involves gentian root and vegetable extracts, and government regulation forces the company to tell us exactly how much alcohol is in it, but there's no telling exactly what makes Angostura do the complex backflips of flavor that it does.

So, that brings us to the Trinidad Sour, the cocktail I'm humbly submitting as the most decadent cocktail in the world. Sure, there's probably some bored billionaire who pounds champagne laced with diamond dust, but you can't get that at any proper bar. The Trinidad Sour is well within your trusted barman's resources, though. There's no definitive recipe, just the insistence that it involves a splash of rye whiskey and a full fluid ounce of Angostura Bitters.

Let's put this in perspective. Most cocktails involving bitters of any sort use, at most, six to eight drops of the stuff. That comes out to maybe an eighth to a sixth of an ounce maximum. Drinking a full ounce of bitters seems pointless and masochistic. In the Trinidad Sour, stuff like orgeat syrup (sweet almond syrup with a touch of rose water and citrus) balances the aromatic intensity of Angostura Bitters to create a deceptively smooth cocktail. It's one of the tastiest things you'll ever imbibe and it's made from a liquor that was very recently on the endangered potables list.

Thankfully, House Angostura got back on its feet and has been churning out plenty of their odd tonic over the past year, especially because of the resurgence of classic cocktails. I highly recommend trying a Trinidad Sour for seasoned cocktail drinkers. It's insane on paper but delicious in execution.