CRAFT SPIRITS spoke with Shawn Herbig, founder of Bluegrass Bitters™, about the science and creativity behind his Kentucky-made line of cocktail modifiers. Founded by Herbig, a Louisville native and president of market research and data analytics firm IQS Research, Bluegrass Bitters™ is his long-awaited brainchild. The brand added its Dark Cherry Bitters, a bold new expression joining its award-winning portfolio alongside the 5-Spice Orange and Black Walnut Bitters, both of which recently received Double Platinum recognition from the 2026 ASCOT Awards.
CSM: What was the biggest technical challenge in building a dark cherry bitters that stayed fruit-forward?
Herbig: The dark cherry was definitely an interesting one.
Prior to releasing that, I would have said that the black walnut was our toughest, no pun intended, toughest nut to crack. The dark cherry definitely got tougher.
For me, the hardest part of the recipe wasn’t creating a bitters that wouldn’t overwhelm the spirit. But it was creating bitters that allowed all of the components in the recipe, not in the glass, but in the recipe, to come through in the proportion that it needed to. So with the dark cherries, it was like a candy cherry.
I try to be particularly sensitive with really all of our products being geared towards bourbon or brown spirits. So I try to be sensitive around understanding the spirit, respecting the spirit and really amplifying some of the natural flavor elements.
With the dark cherry, I wasn’t too worried about overwhelming, per se, versus a candy cherry. But the biggest thing that came out with the dark cherry was considering, well, where do you put the cherry, like on the front end of the taste, on the back end? And then how do you mix that with that middle mouthfeel of those baking spices?
And what we found is, as much as we loved the combo, the profile of the baking spices that we came up with, the cinnamon and vanilla were kind of masking that dark cherry.
I was working with the flavor scientists and I’m like, “We need more cherry. We need more cherry.” And they’re like, “We need to dial back the cinnamon and vanilla to let that cherry come through.” That was a technical eye opener to me because I’m not a food scientist. So I’m really learning a lot.
It’s not that we don’t have enough cherry. It’s that the cherry can’t get out. That to me was the biggest aha moment in all of that R&D.
CSM: Many cherry-driven creations have vanilla notes that come through way more.
Herbig: Yeah. There’s a lot of vanilla. Oftentimes there’s a lot of cinnamon. And those can really be very masking flavors.
So in particular, as you go into the darker with the cinnamon and vanilla coming in with the darker cherry, they can just really hide.
Candidly, I would say this of all the recipes, because we ended up doing a redesign of the cherry. We were almost ready to launch it. Then I said, “Nope, we’re not doing it.”
We were like 90-95 percent there. That’s not good enough. So we went back to the drawing board.
None of the redesign iterations dialed up the cherry. None of them added more cherry to the recipe. All of them dealt with the proportions of everything else in the recipe until the very end.
In the very end, I said, “You know what, I think we’re there. But let’s break it. Let’s do another version that dials up the cherry and keeps the herbal notes the same. Let’s do another version that keeps the cherry the same and dials up the herbal. If we hate both those, then we know we’re on the right path.”
So we literally created two more iterations that were designed to break the recipe. But that was the only time that we dialed up the cherry. Everything else was changing the other ratios, dialing them down, which to me was crazy. I’ve never learned so much.
I do enjoy the process. I really do. It’s easy to nerd out, and I like nerding out on that stuff.
I won’t say I wasn’t frustrated at times, and I won’t say I didn’t enjoy it. You can be a little frustrated and still enjoy what you’re doing, and that’s okay.
CSM: What part of the process do you think is the hardest to scale while maintaining all that flavor complexity?
Herbig: That’s a tough thing to answer because in candor, that was a big part of why we work with the flavor scientists. From day one, we said we want to be able to scale this.
A lot of that was opaque to me because the flavor scientists took the lead on it.
We set the parameters: no artificial flavors, no artificial colors, it has to be Kentucky Proud. Now, you tell me how to go from this mason jar with 12 ounces of gold standard product that I made in my bitters lab at home to a commercial recipe that we can make 8,000 bottles of.
The middle section was their responsibility. We just hired the right people to help us partner on that from the get-go.
CSM: How did your background in market research shape the way that you approach developing and launching this new line of bitters?
Herbig: When you spend a career in research and data analytics, you develop a particular acuity for overthinking things, both positively and negatively. But the positive side is you get very good at reading signals.
When people are trying drinks, they tend to be polite and say, “That was really good.” But you have to look deeper. Who finished their drink? Who asked for a refill?
We get big on segmenting populations. Do I have a hardcore bourbon drinker who normally drinks neat? What do they think? Do I have someone who goes for the 99-cent Wednesday margarita special? What do they think?
Those are different taste profiles. It’s not that either one is wrong, but we’re not going after all of them. We get good at being discriminating about the signals we get.
People want to be polite, and that’s fine, but we lean into honesty whenever we can.
CSM: How important do you think it is to trust your gut?
Herbig: Very important. My background is automotive, and I remember reading Lee Iacocca who said, “Always trust your gut, but never believe it’s enough to make a decision.”
That stuck with me since I was a teenager. You should listen to your gut, but that doesn’t mean you’re right. Let it guide you, then look for cues and data to validate it.
CSM: What metrics or feedback loops matter most when evaluating whether a new product is resonating with customers?
Herbig: When products are in the pipeline, I throw out teasers. I’ve asked 20 different groups what flavors they’d like next. It’s informal, but you start seeing convergence around certain ideas.
That anecdotal feedback is powerful. People love sharing their cocktail recipes and preferences. Listening attentively reveals trends and sparks new ideas.
CSM: What do you wish you had known before scaling your first bitters commercially?
Herbig: That list is long. The pace of the company has been staggering between launching four products, experimenting with atomized bitters, managing PR, building community, and internal processes.
Had I known more about any of those things, life would’ve been easier for me and my team. But learning through the process has been invaluable.