Enter Skip Tognetti’s Letterpress Distilling and you may believe, at least for a moment, that you’re not in SoDo anymore. The hum of machinery and the siren-like invitation of boozy beverages quickly replace the din of Route 99 or the audible cheers emanating—on good days—from T-Mobile Park. An Italianate portal into Tognetti’s heritage and summers spent with grandparents in Rome, Letterpress, founded in 2012, offers a splendid, award-winning bouquet of liqueurs: amaro, limoncello, and the like.

If you think you don’t know what amaro is, you most likely do, as a smattering of its subsets. Italian for “bitter,” the catchall term encompasses a range of liqueurs macerated with a proprietary blend of herbs and spices. Think less KFC-in-a-cup, though, and more Campari or Fernet-Branca or Jägermeister (amaro isn’t exclusively Italian). Contrary to its homogenizing etymology, amaro can be sweet, syrupy, alpine, artichoke-y, or contain a whole other litany of tasting notes beyond the word count of this article. Amaro’s strength is as wide-ranging as its taste profile, measuring between 16-percent and 40-percent ABV. 

I first tasted Letterpress’s Amaro Amorino in 2019 and felt immediately drawn to its balanced herbal notes, its smooth yet slightly viscous consistency, and its non-headache-inducing alcohol percentage. The local amaro scene has blossomed in the years since (as has my collection of local bottles). A who’s who of distillers has followed Letterpress in the Seattle area, including Fast Penny and SennzaFinne in Interbay, Highside Distilling on Bainbridge Island, Brovo in Woodinville, and the hot-on-the-scene Black Moon (location unknown). You can also find amaro-centric bars across town, spanning from Mimi in Hillman City to Barnacle in Ballard, with amaro featured prominently on cocktail menus in the many neighborhoods in between.

Seattle’s cottage industry of amaro makers punches above its weight. These local distillers have flourished in a way other phenomena that found their start in the early 2000s have not—good riddance to “mixologists,” for example. Seattle’s historic and economic forces, in addition to connoisseurs’ hunt for a drink that really reflects the region as well as distillers’ intentionally local sourcing of ingredients, have let amaro establish itself as a go-to, bona fide Seattle beverage.

I asked Tognetti how he explains amaro’s local success. Not every bustling urban area features burgeoning bitter liqueur production, I noted. (All love to the Metroplex, for example, but ever heard of amaro from Dallas? Exactly.) 

“Seattle is a place where innovation happens,” Tognetti says. From airplanes to tech booms to microbrewing, Seattle has often been a site of creativity and entrepreneurial persistence. Further historicizing that zest for businessmaking and trendsetting, Tognetti contends that Seattle’s innovative bent is a direct result of its frontier ethos, a remnant—for better or worse—of its settler-colonial origins. At the same time, Tognetti surmises, “it’s cold and dark up here for a lot of the year, so we’ve got nothing else to do but sit around and drink stuff.”

There are also market forces at play. Beverages like amaro and limoncello—amaro’s lighter and more lemon-forward cousin—don’t need to be barrel-aged; this let Letterpress go to market quickly, with the aim of eventually pouring capital into distilling whiskey. But Tognetti’s limoncello and amari (the plural for amaro) quickly became runaway hits after he founded the distillery, encouraging him to stick to those products for the long haul.

Dakin Pollard, manager of amaro bar Barnacle, identified a more trickle-down phenomenon at play. Fernet-Branca has become a quintessential bartenders’ drink, taking over from Jameson whiskey as the liquor bartenders serve their off-duty bartending colleagues. 

“People who work in the industry kind of control what’s popular,” Pollard noted. “We like these things, we like bitter herbal liqueurs, and we put them in cocktails on our menu … people drink it and go, ‘Oh, this is so good!’”

According to Matt Glenn of Highside Distilling, the Covid-19 pandemic took influence and power away from bartenders and into the hands of quarantined consumers. 

“The general awareness of cocktails and the ingredients used to make cocktails really increased,” he says. “We started to see a lot more end consumers that were more well-versed in amaro as a necessary ingredient to a lot of classic cocktails … which ultimately helped build up the category a little bit.” 

In a virtuous cycle, consumer awareness has positively influenced some bar owners. Whitney Wesley, who owns and runs Hillman City’s Mimi, leaned into amaro when her bar encountered a major hurdle before opening last year. Its liquor license restricted the establishment to alcoholic drinks below 23 percent ABV, preventing Wesley from offering a full range of alcoholic drinks.

“Consumers come in and ask if we have something, and if I’m not aware of it, then I’ll look it up and figure out how to source it,” Wesley says.

Wesley has consulted peers like amaro bar Persephone in Columbia City and procurers like Big John’s PFI to identify and stock up on unique amaro brands, and has learned how to “get creative” crafting low-ABV cocktails. 

Highside, which Matt Glenn runs alongside his parents, Helen and Jeff, has also tapped into the camaraderie and farm-to-table ethos of Seattle’s restaurants and bars. It created its Sunset Hill Amaro in collaboration with cocktail bar Baker’s as an amaro-tized reflection of our region’s terroir and climate. Using Washington apples as its alcoholic base, and only sourcing ingredients within 150 miles of Seattle, Sunset Hill Amaro is a farm-to-bottle expression of the trees, shrubs, fruits, and herbs you can pluck, sniff, and devour on nearby hikes and sojourns. (I thought I identified hints of Cynar-esque artichoke when sipping it, though it turns out that’s not on the ingredient list. I, like ChatGPT, seem to make things up sometimes.)

Gillian and Joey Diedrick of SennzaFinne have similarly embraced the Seattle food scene’s sense of solidarity to design non-fungible liqueurs. Their Winter amaro uses local Kuma coffee as well as hazelnuts roasted in Delancey’s pizza oven. It tastes like what an espresso martini wishes it could be. Amaro makers historically sourced from “whatever [they] had around,” Gillian said; this inspired SennzaFinne to function as a hyperlocal and temporal representation of Seattle that also draws from the liqueur’s practical origins. Their other season-themed amari are equally delightful and wonky: Spring tastes like pea shoots because it uses pea shoots, Summer refreshes the palate with fennel, while Fall features fungus. Given the “it-takes-a-village” patchwork of roasters, pizza ovens, fungus growers, and microgreen farmers needed to craft SennzaFinne’s products, it’s probably fair to categorize the Diedricks’ work as a distillation of the local relationships sustaining them, not just the raw materials exchanged through those ties. 

For all the garage-founding origins they share with blue-chip Seattle businesses, these indie distillers are never going to become the next billion-dollar corporate giants controlling our lives. There are guardrails on ambition set by amaro itself. The liqueur lacks a massive, high-output conglomerate to compete against à la Johnnie Walker or Jim Beam, letting local makers generate revenue without compromising output or quality or unit economics. And, given amaro’s very wide spectrum of taste profiles and qualities, these bottles aren’t even really competing with each other the way gin or vodka would. There’s room for every amaro in the liquor cabinet. Refreshingly, our local distillers know the reality of these market forces and actively embrace them, fostering a community of distillers, rather than a competitive industry of players jockeying for market share and looking to scale. Our tech overlords could learn something from this economic subsector: ABV is moderate, but spirits are high.