Bitter Thrills — On Kinnie and Escapism
Welcome to the Mediterranean. Welcome to the feeling of the summer sun on your skin, and the smell of salt in the air. To the taste of zesty oranges, to the home of bittersweet memories.
Welcome to the world of Kinnie.
Throughout lockdown, escapism through food and drink became an important coping strategy for me. We couldn’t go anywhere, but flavours and aromas could evoke faraway places or fond memories, or at the very least, provide a little bit of excitement on dreary days.
During what felt like the longest winter ever, lockdown London became a world of oppressively muted tones, all grey, brown, and beige. Every day, I daydreamed of sunnier climes and brighter colours, of turquoise, teal, and topaz. And whenever I needed a sure-fire synaesthetic stimulus to create those colours in my mind, I’d crack open a Kinnie.
Kinnie is the national soft drink of Malta. It’s fairly obscure here in the UK, but more ubiquitous than Coca-Cola in its home country. Made from a blend of botanical extracts that include liquorice, ginseng, and rhubarb, Kinnie is similar to a cola, but with a punchy wormwood-and-orange-rind bitterness that makes it taste vibrant, exciting, sophisticated, and crucially, different. It is, in my opinion, one of the world’s finest, most unique soft drinks.
It helps, of course, that I associate Kinnie with the sunlit limestone and shimmering seas of Malta itself, and the chilled-out holiday I took there two years ago. But I believe it’s Kinnie’s distinctive bitter edge that’s key to its transportive effect. Bitterness commands attention—at least for a moment, it takes you out of whatever mental space you’re in, and into the sensation itself—and by extension, into the memories and emotions you associate with it.
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The general scientific consensus on the function of bitterness is that it’s meant to protect us against poison since many toxic substances register as bitter to the human palate. This is why bitterness is often thought of as unappealing, or at least as something that has the potential to be unappealing, even in moderate amounts. Chef Jennifer McLagan is the author of the fascinating book of essays and recipes Bitter: A Taste of the World’s Most Dangerous Flavour, and she means that subtitle quite literally.
“You could probably eat enough bitterness to kill you in one sitting,” she says, which is not the case with the other tastes—it wouldn’t really be possible to eat enough acidic, salty, sweet, or umami compounds in one go for them to kill you, but many fatally toxic chemicals are noticeably bitter even in minuscule amounts.
Illustrations by Zoë Paterson
This is what makes bitterness so powerful. “It makes you pay attention,” Jennifer explains. “It makes you aware that it’s there, and then it makes you concentrate on what you’re eating. Think of a bag of jelly beans—you could just go through it without thinking, but if there was one bitter one in there, that would wake you up, and you’d start to think about what you’re throwing in your mouth.”
Jennifer also tells me about an unusual phenomenon not fully understood by scientists, which is that there are bitter taste receptors all over your body, not just in your mouth. “The receptors are at the back of the throat, they’re also in your lungs, and you have them in your testicles, interestingly enough!”
Professor Charles Spence, author of Gastrophysics and experimental sensory psychologist at the University of Oxford, concurs that bitterness is a “dangerous” taste, and that danger can be harnessed by drinks producers to make their products more intriguing. “By putting something bitter in a drink, there’s a bit of your evolutionarily old brain that says: ‘Hold on a minute! That’s bitter—that can be poisonous,’ and it draws you back into what you’re tasting just to double-check.”
“We might draw an analogy with perfumes,” Charles continues. “Just perfect top notes are okay for a little while,” he says, but to make a perfume that’s truly entrancing, they need to add something a little bit more, shall we say, earthy. “They put in a little shit,” he says. “It’s sort of a base note.”
““If you love it, you love it passionately, because there’s nothing really like it to replace it.””
He doesn’t mean fragrance houses are actually squirting pipettes full of poo into their products, but they are using a compound called skatole, one of the key elements in the smell of faeces. The perfumer Max Millies describes skatole as having an “animalic, warm, sweet smell, like overripe fruit.” While it can be disastrously off-putting in high concentrations, a small amount can have an odd allure. “Our intimate, familiar body odours are attractive to ourselves on a primal level,” Max explains, and our reaction to a faint aroma of skatole can feel like seeing an old friend, or like coming home."
“But it’s that hint of danger,” says Charles, “that keeps drawing you back.” A well-judged amount of bitterness in a drink does the very same thing.
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If you’ve got a drink that has something to say, a bit of bitterness can help ensure that something gets heard. Our innate “what’s that!?” reaction to bitterness makes us perceive bitter drinks as having more complexity and character.
Charlotte Cook is Head Brewer at Coalition Brewery in Croydon and has worked as a brewer for some of Europe’s most influential producers of hop-forward beer [including Põhjala in Estonia and Manchester’s Cloudwater Brewery,] so she knows a thing or two about the bewitching power of bitterness in beverages.
Our conversation turns to West Coast IPAs, a style that’s now fallen somewhat out of fashion, but for us, remains a firm favourite.
“A West Coast IPA isn’t something that you can just sit and knock back,” Charlotte says. “It’s really strong, for one, and I think there are so many nuances in it; you usually perceive the second and third sips completely differently from the first. There’s a possibility for things to evolve on your palate as you’re drinking. It shouldn’t be difficult to drink or feel like a challenge, but equally, it’s not orange juice.”
Professor Spence says that bitterness doesn’t just draw attention to itself; it actually helps us notice other flavours, too. “In Coca-Cola,” he says, “there may be lots of different flavours in there, but we’re not really able to pick it apart. It just presents as one thing.”
Bitterness gives our palates and our brains something to latch onto because it stands out, which throws other subtleties into sharp relief as well. With bitter drinks, “there are different elements that don’t all fuse together into one mix,” he explains; “there are separate things that you can concentrate on. Then it becomes more interesting.”
On a more basic level, bitterness can simply bring balance to drinks. Jennifer argues that even in dishes that aren’t noticeably bitter, “if it’s not there, it’s just something less. Bitter adds complexity to things without always adding bitterness. It can just be in there, adding more dimension and more fullness, completing the flavour.”
Charlotte agrees: you always need at least a little bit of bitterness in beer simply to balance out the natural sweetness of malt, which would otherwise be too cloying to drink.
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To find out more about how the Maltese themselves apprehend Kinnie and its trademark bitterness, I spoke to two higher-ups at Simonds Farsons Cisk, the conglomerate that produces it: Head of International Business Peter Mercieca, and Executive Director Michael Farrugia, whose father’s cousin, Anthony Farrugia, invented Kinnie in 1952.
Both men speak of Kinnie with rousing pride, especially Mercieca: “It’s part of our national identity,” he says, along with another iconic Farsons product, Cisk lager. “Grow up with Kinnie, grow old with Cisk!” he exclaims.
“We’ve created products which are Maltese and proud to be Maltese, so we will drink them even if we don’t like them!”
“Malta doesn’t have a lot to be proud of from a resource point of view,” Peter continues. “We’re a dry rock in the middle of the Mediterranean. But we produce fantastic drinks.”
He’s right—Malta should be proud of Kinnie, which has a sizable international cult following one wouldn’t expect of such an esoteric beverage from a small island nation. Kinnie is sold all over Europe, produced under contract in Australia, and is even exported to Canada and Japan. There’s something about it that seems to get people hooked. “Obviously not everyone likes Kinnie,” concedes Michael. “But if you love it, you love it passionately, because there’s nothing really like it to replace it.”
Anthony Farrugia was half Sicilian and was a fan of Chinotto, the bitter orange soft drink particularly popular in the south of Italy. He wanted to make a distinctly Maltese version of the drink, so he worked with an artisanal essence house in Milan to develop what would ultimately become Kinnie. Michael says it was “a real success right from the start,” and it quickly became woven into the fabric of Maltese culture. “It really is ingrained as part of our childhood,” Michael says.
To me, and to most visitors to Malta, Kinnie’s bitter complexity is thrillingly novel, but of course, if you grow up with it, it may elicit a different kind of reaction. Michael says, “We did a lot of research on our products about ten years ago and found that it was generally becoming associated with grandmothers—people would call it ‘the drink of nanna.’”
I was surprised to hear this, but of course, it’s exactly what you might expect from a product that’s almost 70 years old. “It was becoming associated with something old school. So we made quite a number of changes in terms of its image and branding.”
Not that Kinnie’s market dominance was ever really under threat; it has always been Malta’s number one soft drink, outselling Coca-Cola even though Kinnie has a higher price point. Kinnie is undoubtedly a more flavourful product, but more importantly, it has an emotional resonance with the Maltese people that no amount of American corporate clout can muscle in on.
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“Some people are sensation seekers,” Professor Spence muses. “And why wouldn’t that extend to the world of taste? Some young kids like extreme sourness, so you get things like Sour Patch Kids. They’re intense—and that’s a thrilling, appealing sensation to many children, and some of their parents.”
The same may be true of people who like bitter drinks—they’re looking for a little thrill. I know I certainly was during the lockdown.
““Bitterness gives our palates and our brains something to latch onto.””
During lockdown I came across a TV commercial for Kinnie that showed me how bitter drinks can be comforting, too. It told a story of a locked-down young man whose mother banished him to the kitchen to teach himself to cook after she became frustrated with his pandemic-induced indolence. By the end of the year, he was able to cook a glorious Christmas feast for his family. Kinnie was there with him in the kitchen to slake his thirst as he toiled away; and of course in the end it was there on the table to celebrate, too. In Malta, that bitter flavour doesn’t necessarily signify danger; it may signify something more like the opposite: safety, security, and even solace.
Whatever bitterness evokes in each of us, what’s undeniable is that it is evocative. Kinnie, Campari, matcha, or Malört: these things may register as exotic or nostalgic, familiar or foreign. But you can be damn sure they’ll register as something.
