Groundhog Day came and went without the promised delivery of Angostura bitters to Pennsylvania's booze warehouses and distribution centers. Not that this was an unexpected development: Pennsylvania, like the rest of the world, is running low on the bitters, and has been waiting on new orders since last summer.

Bitters are citrusy, herbal -- and, yes, bitter -- alcoholic elixirs. Today they are used as cocktail additives or aperitifs, but originally, many were said to have medicinal qualities, aiding in digestion.

There are plenty of different bitters out there, but Angostura is arguably the premier brand, and is a key ingredient in the Manhattan cocktail, the Old Fashioned, the Rob Roy and some Sazerac recipes. While some bar chefs and mixologists dabble in homemade bitters, most will tell you that there's no replicating, or replacing, the aromatic Angostura.

Any hope that Pennsylvania might avoid the global shortage by dint of its sheer buying power seems to have been misguided. The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board's distribution centers are completely out of Angostura, and most wine and spirits shops are running low on the product.

In Allegheny County, some stores have a single bottle left on the shelves. The Mount Washington store on Shiloh Street appeared to be the best stocked, with more than 20 bottles remaining last week.

"We've had orders open [since] June and July 2009. The most recent scheduled arrival date on the new orders was Feb. 2, which has come and gone. Still, we have been told that it's on its way," said Nick Hays, an LCB spokesman.

The Trinidad company that makes the bitters, House of Angostura, had been in a dispute with the company that supplied its bottles. Angostura also reported that certain ingredients in the bitters' secret recipe were in short supply, and its parent company, CL Financial Group, was enduring financial difficulties. Those issues brought production of the bitters to a virtual halt last June, which naturally led to shipping delays.

In America, the shortage hit late last year, just as demand for bitters-based holiday cocktails was at its zenith.

The company says production levels and deliveries could return to normal this month. In the meantime, bars that rely on bitters are hoarding what remains.

"We started stockpiling over six months ago," said Alana Bly, marketing director at the Firehouse Lounge in the Strip District and its downstairs companion bar, Embury. "I'm sitting on about 12 cases of it."

Maggie Meskey, head mixologist at Eleven restaurant in the Strip, said her bar has about 12 bottles. "I've started carrying a bottle of it with me," she said, in case she finds herself in a bar that is out of Angostura (then again, she does the same thing with Peychaud's Bitters).

Pennsylvania hasn't been hit as hard as, say, New York and Chicago, where bars have been scrambling for bottles since December, and are buying them online from Amazon and eBay. About the only major cocktail mecca that hasn't been hit by the shortage is New Orleans, partly because of the city's heavy reliance on Peychaud's, which was invented there. Not even the city's recent Super Bowl victory and ongoing Mardi Gras celebration have been enough to deplete the stock, said Lu Brow, bar chef at Cafe Adelaide and the Swizzle Stick Bar at Loews New Orleans hotel.

"Every bartender in the country tells me they're short, but we're not," she said. The hard-drinking Super Bowl parade crowd emptied every last beer keg at the Swizzle Stick, at least temporarily, but as for Angostura, "I have a couple of dozen bottles handy."

Not so in New York, where well-known bartender and gifted hyperbolist Tracy Westmoreland told the New York Post: "I believe it is the end of civilization as we know it if we can't have bitters. ... It's like when the saber-tooth tiger went extinct. It's a terrible thing."

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