Harris's patented* pick-me-up bitters

D.R. Harris is an ancient pharmacy in St James’s, the heart of London’s “Clubland” (that’s “club” in the sense of gentleman’s club full of leather armchairs, not in the Ibiza sense of the word). It’s been there since 1790. Not the bright strip-lights and melamine shelves of Boots or Superdrug, but rather a carpeted gloomth and mahogany shelving displaying tastefully modest quantities of their soaps, fragrances, shaving products—I’m sure the discreetly scarce volume of product on display is somehow designed to create a sense of scarcity that will justify the high prices. There is even an elegant pedestal wash basin in one corner: I’m not sure if this is so you can actually try stuff out, or whether it’s designed to show you how great their products will look in your bathroom.

Back in the 19th century the shop was famed for it’s “pick-me-up” tonic, available either as a ready-to-drink draught over the counter for those with an immediate need, or in concentrated form for home use. As might be appropriate in Clubland, it was much prized as a hangover cure. It was on sale from the 1860s but at some point in the early 2000s they discontinued it; there is a suggestion that it didn’t really taste very nice, though the main ingredients were cardamom, clove and gentian which (aside from the bitterness of the gentian) don’t sound too bad.**

So I was intrigued to hear that they have now brought it back in the form of a cocktail bitters, reimagined with the help of Bob Petrie from Bob’s Bitters. Interestingly, the blurb on the website still looks at the concoction as a restorative, listing the beneficial effects of the ingredients on the digestion, liver, mood, etc, but at the same time offers cocktail recipes. I guess it saves time if you can take your hangover cure at the same time as the drink that gives you the hangover in the first place.

Although there have been many bitters entering the market in recent years, I decided to do my analysis alongside Angostura bitters, without doubt the most well known, and probably the only bitters that most people in the UK have heard of—here even Peychaud’s is not known outside the realm of the enthusiast. 

Open the cap and sniff the Angostura bottle and you get a powerful smell, an earthy base with bitter menthol or mint top notes. For me there is a strong element of cinnamon or cassia, with clove and a bit of chocolate too. Taste it neat and again there is heavy cinnamon, with bright, brittle mentholic fumes rising up. They don’t give much away about what is in it, other than gentian plus various vegetable extracts.

The Harris bitters has an immediately similar nose (but then gentian and clove are key ingredients), but at the same time fruitier and less woody. I get lime—in fact this is not given as an ingredient though there is lemon peel and bergamot. Pour some out and you’re immediately struck by the pale, straw-like colour compared to the dark red-brown of Angostura. Tasted neat it again shows less of the woodiness of cinnamon but it does have a fruitiness like jam or marmalade. I would say that the two bitters clearly have similar building blocks, with woody, earthy base notes and bitter, aromatic top notes, but the Harris offering does seem more sophisticated; you find yourself probing its complexity as tendrils of vanilla, chocolate and even chilli emerge (the fiery hint may come from ginger). 

The two bitters with water, Angostura on the left and Harris on the right

Compared to the Harris, the Angostura does seem rather crude now. But of course neither of these concoctions is intended to be consumed neat. The original Harris pick-me-up was simply added to water, so I tried adding five good dashes to a shot of water. The Angostura retained its essential character strongly at this dilution—cloves, cinnamon and gentian bitterness. The Harris was again lighter and more complex. I’m convinced you can smell the honey, but on the tongue I’d say it was actually less sweet than the Angostura. (Note that the Angostura bottle releases liquid much more readily that the Harris bottle, so it is hard to be scientifically precise about the quantities involved.) Overall the Harris is lighter, brighter and with a more pronounced high bitter finish.

Next I tried a Pink Gin, the classic bitters-forward blend of just gin and bitters, usually with water. This was a favourite of my father-in-law, who took it unchilled, which I believe is traditional. I blended 15ml gin with 10ml water and three dashes of bitters. In these proportions the Angostura bitters certainly make their presence felt and do sit well with the botanicals of the gin (I was using Tanqueray, which famously employs just four, juniper, coriander, angelica and liquorice). With the Harris bitters, of course, your Pink Gin isn’t pink. It also has a subtler nose with honey and ginger coming up. On the tongue I would say it was actually more harmonious with the gin than Angostura, but again with a more bitter finish. Intriguingly, it also seemed to evolve and “open up” in the glass, becoming more characterful as time goes by.

A Martinez with Harris bitters, made using the recipe on the site. Very good it is

Finally, I try a Manhattan, mixing 15ml of Bulleit bourbon with 5ml of Belsazar Red vermouth and a good dash of bitters. Even in this reduced quantity compared to the previous test, and against some powerfully flavoured other ingredients, there is a difference between the two bitters: the Angostura makes for a heavier, jammier cocktail, while the Harris bitters made a lighter, more approachable drink, with a pronounced bright bitterness. It does come across as more sophisticated, less heavy and somehow more thoughtful—if that is something you look for in a cocktail.

So overall I am impressed. The Harris bitters are not cheap: 100ml is £20, though you can buy a 10ml taster for £6.50. But by comparison Angostura is £10 for 200ml, so a quarter of the price. (Angostura is more alcoholic too—44.7% compared to Harris’s 34%—but in the quantities in which it is consumed this is not really relevant.) But certainly the Harris Pick-Me-Up bitters are worth it, given that 100ml will last you a while. A note of warning, however: you had better like bitter flavours. I gave both versions with gin to Mrs H. to taste and she made that scrunched-up “this tastes like poison!” face that even hoppy ale produces in her. But if you are at ease with bitterness you will also find much more to this complex blend.

D.R. Harris’s Pick-Me-Up bitters can be ordered from the company’s website or if you have access to the capital you can saunter into their shop and buy it over the counter.

* I’ve no idea if it is patented.

** Elsewhere I’ve seen a suggestion that it was only in the early 2000s that they realised they would need an alcohol licence to sell it, which they clearly had never had, though I guess they must have an off-licence now.

Spiced rum death-match

I asked David, who runs the food and drink side of the Candlelight Club, if there was one of our previous Christmas cocktails that we could offer people to make at home, as a sort of vicarious seasonal experience. The cocktail in question was the Spiced Clementine Daiquiri (see below). The base spirit is spiced rum, which got me pondering.

At some point in the past I acquired a bottle of Sailor Jerry’s spiced rum and I found it repellently sickly. I’ve rather avoided spiced rum ever since. But I also remember, at the launch of the Chairman’s Reserve Rum range, that they had an incarnation that I thought was actually not bad. So I did a bit of online research to collate as many “top spiced rums” lists as I could find and, based on these recommendations, ended up with a short list of four. So, in the spirit of scientific rigour for which the Institute for Alcoholic Experimentation is renowned, I bought all four.

The cheapest on the list is Red Leg, which is common in supermarkets and can be had for £15 a bottle. It’s made from “Caribbean” rum, aged in barrels for an unspecified time before being infused with vanilla and ginger. It is named after the Red Legged Hermit Crab native to the Caribbean. It’s a golden colour, with a nose that is a strong, rather cloying, blast of vanilla and caramel or butterscotch. On the palate it is pretty sweet with a flavour of brown sugar and vanilla, with some heat: it’s only 37.5% ABV, so I’m guessing this might be from the ginger, although aside from this the flavour of ginger is not hugely apparent. It’s quite one-dimensional, all about the sugar/vanilla thing.

Next up is Dead Man’s Fingers, created at the Rum and Crab Shack in St Ives, Cornwall. These crazy cats wanted to add some unexpected flavours (I mean, does rum and crab even go together?), citing Cornish saffron cakes, spiced fruit and an ice cream they serve made with sweet, concentrated Pedro Ximenez sherry, plus “nutmeg, vanilla and a hint of orange”. It’s a darker colour than the Red Leg and has a powerful nose with a noticeable ginger element, plus what smells to me like lime. There is also a rather savoury mid-note, almost like onion, and I can get saffron too. After it opens up in the glass a smoky element emerges. On the palate it is less sweet than the Red Leg. There is definitely vanilla (which seems to be the main defining flavour in spiced rum), but a prominent flavour of fresh ginger, giving it a fiery kick, like ginger beer, and a slightly bitter finish. It leaves an aftertaste of Turkish delight, the kind that comes dusted in icing sugar.

Despite the skull on the bottle, Dead Man’s Fingers is not named after anything piratical, but after the local nickname for a crab’s gills (a bit of the crab that is discarded, as it doesn’t taste very nice). So that’s two rums named after crabs. The next up is Foursquare Spiced Rum which, by contrast, is named after the sugar estate, apparently one of the oldest in Barbados, where they’ve been making rum since 1640. The bottle gives nothing much away about its contents, only that the blending recipe is a secret known only to generations of the Seale family. It is very lightly flavoured compared to the others, paler than Dead Man’s Fingers and not really sweetened at all. Many reviewers talk about a primary flavour of cinnamon, but for me the most noticeable element is coconut, with a hint of sherry, which gives it a refined edge, and maybe a whiff of oatmeal. (I don’t know if there is any coconut in it, though I detect a hint of a similar aroma on the next rum and I wonder if it’s an impression created by clove in combination with something else.) On the tongue it is also mostly coconut that I get, plus the dry barkiness of cinnamon. Mind you, perhaps I’m doing it a disservice by tasting it after the gutsy punch of Dead Man’s Fingers, but I’m not really getting much at all from this rum. I try it again the next day, and I would say that it does have a quiet, genteel polish to it, but compared to the others there is not a lot going on.

The Foursquare is about £26 a bottle, and my final sample creeps up to £32—the Chairman’s Spiced Rum. It’s also 40% ABV, while all the others are just 37.5%. The label admits to “Caribbean fruits, bark and spice”, naming cinnamon, vanilla, nutmeg, clove and bitter orange specifically. The nose is buttery, with a strong waft of orange peel and some cocoa. It’s a bit like smelling a Terry’s Chocolate Orange. There is also a strong note of raisins, plus cinnamon and clove. The palate is led by the orange note again. They talk about “bitter” orange, but the result is rich and smooth, a bit like eating a liqueur-filled chocolate—though not particularly sweet as such.* This rum is the one that I would choose to drink neat, smooth but not too sweet, rich but subtle, detailed and not overblown. As you dig in new flavours emerge, all deftly blended. Going back to the Foursquare, the latter is certainly cultured enough to drink on its own, but it does seem thin and dry by comparison with the Chairman’s.

But let’s not forget that the starting point for all of this was a cocktail. How do these rums perform when mixed? Here is the recipe:

Spiced Rum Daiquiri
50 ml spiced rum
75 ml clementine juice
10 ml vanilla syrup
10 ml lime juice (optional)
3 good dashes of Angostura bitters

Shake all the ingredients together with ice in a cocktail shaker and strain into a (largish) cocktail glass. Garnish with a strip of clementine or satsuma zest.

Clementine juice is something that most supermarkets seem to sell at Christmas, though perhaps not at other times. It’s actually strikingly different from orange juice, sharper with more or a rindy pep, almost as if it already has a little lime in it. In any case, for my palate the added lime juice is needed to balance the syrup, but if you have a sweet tooth you may wish to leave it out. With spiced rum’s typical flavours of vanilla, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, orange peel and clove, plus the clementine juice (and Angostura has quite a cinnamon stripe to it) you've basically got Christmas in a glass. (I also tried it with a bitters that David had made a previous Christmas, which is heavy on clove, and this really boosted the Christmasy combination.)

Although I found the Red Leg rum a bit sickly on its own, it works fine in this cocktail, and it was Mrs H.’s favourite out of the lot, though she has a sweeter tooth than me. Dead Man’s Fingers benefits from its strong flavouring and punchy profile, easily making its presence felt against the other ingredients. For me this was probably the best choice for the drink, though Mrs H. didn’t like it so much—I think the edge of bitterness it brought wasn’t to her taste. The Foursquare was the least successful here: it’s too delicate to make much of an impression, and if you try to adjust this by adding more of the rum, it just unbalances the cocktail. Finally, the Chairman’s Spiced Rum certainly does work well in this drink, though I would argue that its leading flavour of orange might get a bit lost against the other citrus in the drink—and to be honest I’d rather save it to drink neat.

I also tried these rums with Fentiman’s ginger beer, with and without a squeeze of lime (so a Dark and Stormy cocktail). For me the Red Leg is just too sweet without a hefty dose of lime juice, and again the Foursquare got lost, but the other two worked well. You might think that the Dead Man’s Fingers with its strong peppery ginger character would be overkill with the ginger in the mixer, but it seemed to work OK. Again, I think the vividness of this rum makes it good with mixers in general.

But for me the star of the show was the Chairman’s Spiced Rum. It’s the only one I would choose to drink neat, and that is indeed what I was doing with it over Christmas. In a way it’s the first spiced rum I’ve tasted that, for me, justifies the existence of spiced rum as a concept—they are generally too sweet, crude and overblown for me, but this example is complex and poised. Whether you’d want to mix with it, given the price, is another question. If you specifically want a spiced rum for mixing, at £18 the Dead Man’s Fingers is a good bet.**

* I have a distant recollection that the Greek spiced fortified wine Metaxa tastes a bit like this, with an orange thrust. I’ve got some Metaxa in the cellar so I go and check: the dusty bottle is 95% empty, so probably not at its best, but in fact it has a floral nose and a muscaty taste, so nothing like the rum at all. Forget I ever mentioned it. And I can report that the Chairman’s Spiced Rum is a far superior drink in any case.

** The Kraken is another popular spiced rum, but I didn’t include it in this experiment as it didn’t really feature in my initial trawl of other people’s top-spiced-rum lists, but I have tried it at a trade show once and I don’t recall being terribly impressed. I think was was probably too sweet, and the underlying rum a bit rough.