Crude Small-Batch Bitters & Sodas Anniversary Celebration
Saturday, Dec. 5, 4–8 p.m.
517-A W. Cabarrus St., Raleigh
919-391-8185 www.crudebitters.com

About a year ago, Craig Rudewicz told his family he was going to quit his job behind a bar to put all his time behind a business that made bitters, the highly concentrated, highly alcoholic extracts used to flavor cocktails. His start-up company would be North Carolina’s first, meaning it was a concept so nebulous state regulators didn’t even know what to do with it. They seemed understandably skeptical.

“I had family ask, ‘Is that really a thing? You’re just going to make bitters? You’ve got nothing else to do?’” Rudewicz recalls. “And I said, ‘Yeah, we’ll try it.’ It was a nerve-wracking time to just dive into something that was kind of obscure, to make that your full-time job.”

But it worked: In early December, Raleigh’s Crude Small-Batch Bitters & Sodas will celebrate its third anniversary while marking the end of the first year for ABV, Crude’s relatively new retail extension. You can now spot Crude Bitters in Oregon and California, scattered locations throughout the Midwest, in the New England area, in Washington, D.C. and New York. Rudewicz has started to increase appearances on the trade show circuit, too, and he often teaches popular classes about crafting cocktails and enhancing flavors at ABV. Crude’s reputation rose quickly after the company nabbed a Good Food Award at a San Francisco gala in January. Crude is the first bitters business to win the honor, which is designed to promote quality food products that are small-batch and sustainable from community-conscious companies.

“A year ago, we were making four gallons of each year-round flavor and then dividing them into 4-ounce bottles, so each batch of each flavor was maybe about 150 bottles,” Rudewicz says. “Now, for our year-round flavors, we’re doing close to about 400 bottles of each flavor.”

For Rudewicz, bitters have actually proven pretty sweet.

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Stepping through ABV’s front door feels like entering a temporal rift: An old case emblazoned with an RC Cola logo holds a bundle of bottles. A popcorn machine rescued from a movie theater rests against a wall, and a turntable plays ’70s rock from a distant corner. The wooden back bar, built by Rudewicz, is rough and functional. The front bar was salvaged for its second life after years of service as the counter at Person Street Pharmacy.

Standing next to it, though, Rudewicz appears to be a thoroughly modern artisana bearded 33-year-old with tattoos on both arms and the physique of a recreational hiker. He is the Triangle’s evangelist of bitters.

“Bitters round out a drink,” Rudewicz proselytizes. “They help cut the sugar and the sweetness of a drink. It wakes your taste buds up a little bit. If you’re using certain syrups or certain liquors and you’re going to complement that with bitters, it bolsters whatever flavors are in there.”

In ABV, a tasting station boasting an array of flavors runs the length of a wooden long box. An aged label on a tiny jar proclaims the contents to be “Rhubarb and Soda,” part of a series of bottles dotting a wooden shelf high on the wall. Crude’s very first bottle of bitters holds prime position at the display’s center.

“People think whiskey, bourbon, Old Fashioneds, Manhattans, because those are the classic drinks that call for Angostura bitters, the very first bitters,” he continues. “That’s what people are used to. That’s what your grandfather drank.”

Times have changed though. Crude now makes a variety of flavors, including lighter ones.

“We make some that go better with gin or vodka or tequila. And we make some that go better in bourbon and whiskey,” Rudewicz says. “At the front, we have a little bitters tasting bar. People can dash it in a cup or dash it right on their hand and just get a sense of what it is. Also, if you have a drink in mind or if you like a certain type of liquor, light or dark, we can steer you.”

Though bitters now seem almost like an obsession for Rudewicz, making them began as a mere hobby. As a film major at the University of Pittsburgh, he had the typical collegiate phase of drinking whatever happened to be cheap. But then he discovered that the act of crafting meticulous cocktails could be fun. When he and his wife, Lindsay Lasserre, moved to the Triangle almost five years ago, he started making bitters at home in Mason jars. He would give them away as birthday or Christmas presents.

“I just started making too many of them,” he admits. “They were taking over the cupboards.”

When Rudewicz began running the bar at the Little Hen restaurant in Apex, he suddenly had a ready-made focus group for his bitters-making experiments. He could make larger batches using the restaurant’s kitchen, too. The process and the enthusiasm of the patrons at Little Hen motivated him to launch Crude.

There were obstacles aside from familial doubt; the biggest might have been becoming the first such company seeking state permits. (Bull City Bitters has since opened in Asheville.)

“The state, being a controlled state, with alcohol, bitters fall into this kind of weird gray area between a food product similar to vanilla extract and an alcoholic product,” Rudewicz explains. “I would contact the ABC, and they had no idea what to do with the idea of a bitters company. I talked with the Small Business Administration and got help from them, but they also had no idea whether bitters were going to be classified as alcohol or classified as a food.”

He downloaded the state’s ABC statutes and read the tome from front to back. Unfortunately, what he needed was toward the end of the voluminous set of rules and regulations.

“The front of it is all actual alcohol, and the back end is all kind of throwaway ideas they had,” he says with a laugh. “I just sat there and read every single one of them until we found the exact sentence that said bitters do not require an ABC license. So they’re a food product, and that’s all written in the ABC statutes.”

With that settled, Rudewicz began visiting farmers markets and anywhere else that offered him the chance to show people how to use bitters in something other than Manhattans. After more than a year, Rudewicz left Little Hen and devoted himself full-time to Crude.

Finally, he needed a production space of his own. He felt like Raleigh’s food scene understood his idea. Having scouted Durham and Chapel Hill before deciding to live in Raleigh, he knew he wanted the business to be based there, too. He found a spot next to a construction company in a warehouse on West Cabarrus Street, near downtown Raleigh. Its layout led to ABV, as Rudewicz thought of ways to use the space at the front.

ABV sells Crude’s bitters and those from companies across the country. Rudewicz produces Crude’s bitters behind the ABV retail area. A set of shelves holds large glass bottles where the ingredientspecans and peppers, grapefruits and rosemary, coffee and cacaomacerate in high-proof alcohol. Every so often, he will give the bottles “a good shake” to make sure everything steeps at the same rate. Each batch takes at least a month and a half to make, a period that fluctuates based on the environment.

“That’s just a straight maceration [of the] herbs and peels in there. It depends on the humidity in the room, the temperature in the room,” he explains. “That can either shorten the maceration process or lengthen it. Then, once that’s good and ready and potent, we can start the bottling procedure.”

Rudewicz remains Crude’s sole employee, meaning that this final step can be a bit tedious, as he must handle all the liquid himself. He strains to produce a pure liquid and then dilutes it slightly with water. Sometimes, he has to doctor it carefully with honey or sorghum to counterbalance the bitterness.

“Then,” he says, “we just take gallons and gallons of bitters and put it all into very tiny bottles.”

To help with that step, Rudewicz has at least gotten a tabletop bottling machine. Before buying the bottling machine, Rudewicz was a using a funnel to fill 4-ounce bottles while cradling a large production bottle in one arm. The machine fills just one tiny bottle at a time, but it has been a huge relief for his forearms, he says, shaking out his right arm as if to rid it of a bad muscle memory. He then affixes the labels and packs and ships out-of-state orders or delivers to customers across the Triangle.

“If you see a bottle of our bitters,” Rudewicz says, “I have done everything it takes along the way to get it on the shelves.”

At least he’s a little more comfortable about being in a field of (almost) one, three years later.

Shrub life

Crude doesn’t just make bitters; Rudewicz also makes syrups for sodas and “shrubs.”

Farmers used to make shrubs by chopping fruit, throwing it in a barrel and covering it with a thin layer of vinegar and cane sugar. The resulting syrup was mixed with water to create a thirst-quenching drink for farmers sweating in the fields.

“The reason that we took the dive into shrubs is that I’m not a proponent of using heat in anything I do, especially the bitters. When you boil something or you heat something, you’re just burning the essence and oils and flavor out of whatever you’re doing,” he says. “So shrubs are a very nice way to preserve something without using heat. It fit into the same line of thinking as our bitters.”

You can now find Crude’s shrubs in several places, but to sample the true sodas, your best bet is Person Street Pharmacy. It uses an old-fashioned soda fountain with metal pull taps. Choose your flavor, and then watch the syrup mix with soda water from the tap.

Or you could have a mix of bitters and seltzer, another refreshing option for Rudewicz.

“They just dash a bit of whatever flavor you’d like into seltzer water, and it makes a sugar free soda,” he says. “Old-fashioned soda fountains called it a hangover cure, using just a couple of dashes of Angostura and seltzer water. It settles your stomach a little bit, makes you feel a little better.” Curt Fields

This article appeared in print with the headline “Arduous extraction”