King Floyd’s Bitters
Founded by Lawrence Floyd Batterton in 2017, King Floyd’s Bitters are alcoholic, non-potable cocktail bitters crafted in Novato, California. Featuring an expansive range of quintessential and intuitive binding and flavoring bitters, King Floyd’s Bitters provide incredible depth of flavor and strong, vibrant aromas to add that crucial touch to thousands of cocktails. Named for his father, from whom his middle name is taken, the name “King Floyd” also pays homage to self-proclaimed Emperor of the United States, Emperor Norton, of San Francisco Barbary Coast fame.
Lawrence started in the herbal extract business in 1994—or as he puts it from a contemporary cocktail perspective, “when the dinosaurs roamed the earth”—as a materials manager for a vitamin company, trading herbal extracts on a global scale, and by the late 1990s started a sales and marketing company focusing on domestic producers. In 2013, while having drinks with herbalist and owner of Vitality Works, Mitch Coven, the direct correlation was made between the herbal extracts in their products and the production of classic cocktail bitters, thus kickstarting Batterton’s cocktail-bitter journey.
After converting wine bottles into rudimentary percolation cones, he gathered botanicals and high-proof grain alcohol and began crafting his own extractions and blends in the back of his office. For the first three years, these blends were given away to local bartenders to play with, and Batterton tweaked the recipe until he finally landed on the brand’s flagship Aromatic bitters blend. Once he started, he found it impossible to stop, and in 2017 his hobby became an obsession before finally transitioning to a licensed, full-time business.
Starting with the finest botanicals—many of which are grown onsite or certified organic—extracts are derived using either corn-based, high-proof neutral grain spirit or deionized, UV-filtered water. King Floyd’s bitters are produced using a combination of traditional maceration as well as percolation to craft the extracts used in the blend of each expression, and each botanical is individually extracted and tasted daily for up to two months before blending to ensure consistency from batch to batch. Additionally, each “spent” botanical is pressed using a 30-ton herb press to extract every last drop of flavor.