The Trinidad Sour was created by ex-New York City bartender Giuseppe Gonzalez while he was plying his trade at the Clover Club in Brooklyn in 2009. The unique serve is a mixture of a whopping one and a half ounces (or one ounce, depending on who you ask) of Angostura bitters, balanced with lemon juice, orgeat (a nut syrup) and rye whiskey. Gonzalez developed the concept after being inspired by Italian bartender Valentino Bolognese’s competition-winning Trinidad Especial, which used lime instead of lemon, and pisco instead of rye. While Gonzalez’s new elixir was delicious, well-balanced, and had a unique texture due to the oily Angostura bitters and rich orgeat, it didn’t catch on right away.

“It wasn’t an instant hit,” Gonzalez says, “it was a slow roll, but I put it in the hands of bartenders who helped champion it by serving it to guests.” Gonzalez would taste as many bartenders as he could on the cocktail, looking for feedback and criticism. “Giuseppe Gonzalez was always a rule breaker,” Julie Reiner, owner of Clover Club and co-founder of Social Hour, says. “Giuseppe tasted me on the drink and I was stunned that he used Angostura as the base,” she recalls. “It was something I had never seen before, and it was delicious. I told Giu that it was very creative, and that I didn’t expect it to work, but it did.”

Gonzalez’s sounding board was John Gertsen, a popular bartender who co-founded the award-winning Drink in Boston, and went on to work at ABV in San Francisco. “The drink didn’t become popular until John Gertsen at Drink started serving it,” Gonzalez says. Drink is a menu-less bar concept, so Gertsen would keep the Trinidad Sour in his back pocket for guests that were looking for something adventurous to drink.

Gertsen served the drink so much that Gonzalez recalls working at Clover Club and having a guest come in and ordering the Trinidad Sour after having first tasted it at Drink. “I smiled and looked at the guest because, to their surprise, I knew how to make it, but they sent it back because it wasn’t the way John made it,” Gonzalez says, laughing.

But it wasn’t until Gonzalez moved to Las Vegas in 2018 to bartend that he realized how popular the cocktail had become. “I remember working at Herbs and Rye and there was a guy at the bar who ordered the Trinidad Sour, and I said ‘go fuck yourself,’ thinking he was messing with me, and kept working,” Gonzalez laughs. “He walked over to Nectaly [the owner] and told him what I said, and he started cracking up too [because he knew that’s what he’d say to anyone who ordered the drink from him]. The guy was so confused, but then I told him to google the cocktail and he put it all together. The guy had tried the cocktail in London, and that was one of those moments where I realized how big it really was.”

Référence : https://www.insidehook.com/drinks/trinidad-sour-cocktail-popularized-bitters-recipe