Critter Bitters, a new cricket-based cocktail bitter
The new cricket-based cocktail bitter launched on Kickstarter, among the first in the burgeoning edible insect market to offer a solution for spirits. Critter Bitters
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For the past several years, startups across the country have introduced insect-based foods to the market, from cookies to crackers to raw milled insects. Now one of those fledgling products, a cricket-based cocktail bitter, will soon be available on a broader scale.

Critter Bitters co-founders Julia Plevin and Lucy Knops just launched a Kickstarter campaign to help grow their business, which started as a design project when the two were students at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

They’ve been tweaking their recipe ever since. “Originally back in grad school we had four flavors,” says Knops. “But we narrowed down to perfecting one recipe that highlights the cricket element.” That said, there are other spices in the bitters to help compliment the crickets.

Critter Bitters co-founders Julia Plevin and Lucy Knops

Critter Bitters co-founders Julia Plevin and Lucy Knops

The two enterprising founders came up with the idea for cricket-based cocktail bitters as graduate students at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Last March, while reporting a feature on entomphagy, Popular Science sat down with Plevin and Knops at—no joke—the Manhattan Cricket Club on the Upper West Side (that’s a reference to the sport, not the insect). The bar’s owner, mixologist Greg Seider, whipped up some drinks using the bitters and we munched on a variety of insect snacks including honey mustard roasted crickets and Chirps chips (courtesy of the magazine, not the bar).

So if you, too, want to raise a glass to entomophagy, grab some bitters through the Kickstarter. Here are some recipes to get you started, adapted from Seider’s book Alchemy in a Glass.

Old Fashioned

2 oz Highwest double rye or favorite bourbon

1/4 oz Agave Mix (equal parts water and light agave syrup)

3 droppers full Critter Bitters

Add all ingredients to mixing tin full of ice. Stir 50 times and strain over ice in rocks glass. Garnish with orange peel.

Daiquiri

2 oz Plantation 3 star or Cana Brava rum

1 oz fresh lime juice

3/4 oz Agave mix

3 droppers full Critter Bitters

Add all ingredients to metal shaker tin. Fill with ice. Hard shake 8 to 10 seconds.

Double strain over ice in large rocks glass. Garnish with micro plane lime zest and streak of vanilla cricket bitters.

Perfecting the Critter Bitters cricket cocktail bitters

Perfecting the Critter Bitters cricket-based cocktail bitters

It’s not just one kind of cricket that’s used in the new Critter Bitters cocktail bitters recipe.