Born in Italy. Raised in Boston.
Bully Boy Distiller's Amaro is a riff on the classic bitter liqueur. It took us two years and hundreds of batches to arrive at the recipe. We settled on a combination of over twenty six different botanicals, all of which contribute to the patchwork of flavor and aroma. The bitter backbone comes from a combination of hops, including Amarillo, Cascade, Citra, and Galaxy. It's complimented by a pop of grapefruit, and its rounded out by earthy and floral notes, including yarrow, rhubarb root, and fig. There is just enough sweetness to make it all work, and at 58 proof its soft enough to sip neat but robust enough to use in cocktails.
Because every batch needs to steep for three weeks, research and development was excruciating. We'd tweak it, sit on our hands for three weeks, test it, and tweak it again. Sometimes the changes would be subtle, pushing forward or pulling back an ingredient by 1% or less, and sometimes the changes would be major (We still remember the moment we introduced fig). At the end of the day, everything needed to be perfectly balanced, and with twenty-six different ingredients, there were thousands (millions?) of different relationships to manage. It took a lot of patience, but as lovers of Amaro, we had to get it right.