Five Underrated Fernet Bottles to Add to Your Collection

What makes a fernet, a fernet? It’s complicated. While grounded in history, tradition, secret recipes and very strong (yet often conflicting) opinions, Italian amaro takes the field without an official rule book, which can prove equally inspiring and problematic to producers. 

You can, however, expect a few core tenets in the fernet subcategory: a dark brown to jet-black hue, an elevated level of alcohol, less sugar, a minty or mentholated backbone, a pronounced herbal bitterness and a handful of quintessential herbs and botanicals like chamomile, eucalyptus, mint, myrrh, aloe ferox, rhubarb root and saffron.

While not the first fernet, Fernet-Branca, which was founded in 1845, is by far the most famous. Each bottle of the amaro features the eagle and globe logo, a manifestation of Branca’s epic worldwide reach and its motto: “Excellence knows no oceans, no frontiers.” Each yearly revolution of that globe seems to bring new styles of fernet to the table, from stalwart Italian producers and younger American brands alike.

The last time I took stock of the fernet landscape, I focused on the new-school bottles to know. This list adds some newcomers stretching from Japan to the Pacific Northwest, but also legacy brands looking to dust off a first-generation fernet, slightly reformulated for modern times.

Here are five often overlooked or underrated fernet bottles worth adding to your collection.