What Is Umeshu? (And Meet Ume & Bitter)

Let us get the awkward part out of the way first, because it shapes everything below. Umeshu appears exactly once across the whole of our Hamilton Road drinks offering. It is not a pour on our sake list. It is not on the wine card. It exists in one place: inside a cocktail called Ume & Bitter.

That is a slightly odd position from which to write a guide to umeshu, and we are writing one anyway, because the thing is genuinely interesting and almost everybody who orders that cocktail has no idea what the third ingredient is.

What umeshu actually is

Umeshu is a steeped fruit liqueur. Green ume are put into a spirit with sugar and left alone for months, and what comes out is amber-gold, sweet, sharply fruity and noticeably softer than whatever went in.

Three things it is not, all of which get muddled constantly:

• It is not sake. Sake is brewed from rice. Umeshu is fruit steeped in an already-finished alcohol. Different process, different category, different aisle. If you want the brewed side of the Japanese drinks world, that is our five sakes.
• It is not plum wine, whatever the English label on a supermarket bottle says. Nothing is fermented into it from the fruit.
• It is not a spirit. It is diluted and sweetened by construction, which is why it behaves like a cordial with a temper rather than like a shot.

And the fruit is not a plum

The ume is Prunus mume, which sits closer to the apricot than to the plum despite the translation everyone uses. Picked green and hard in early summer, it is not something you eat raw — it is sour and astringent to the point of being unpleasant, and it needs either salt or sugar and time to become anything at all.

Japan does both. Salted and dried, the same fruit becomes umeboshi, the pickled plum that turns up in rice balls and on breakfast tables. Sugared and steeped, it becomes umeshu. One fruit, two very old preservation answers, both of them about what to do with a harvest that arrives all at once and cannot be eaten as it is.

Making umeshu at home in early summer, when the green ume show up, is an ordinary domestic ritual in Japan rather than a specialist hobby — a big jar, fruit, rock sugar, spirit, and then a long wait. It is one of the few alcoholic drinks a lot of people genuinely have made themselves.

How it is made, and why that matters to the taste

The fruit goes in whole and raw. Rock sugar is layered with it because it dissolves slowly, which draws the juice out gradually rather than all at once. Then it sits. Over months the liquid pulls sweetness, acidity and the almond-ish note that lives in stone fruit kernels out of the ume, and the alcohol drops as the sugar and juice dilute it.

The fruit is often left in the jar, which is why a bottle can carry a whole ume inside it and why the flavour keeps developing. Age it long enough and it goes darker, rounder and more marmalade-like.

What you get, broadly: sweet first, then a real sourness underneath that stops it being cloying, with a stone-fruit perfume and a faintly nutty finish. It is one of the few sweet drinks that stays interesting, because the acid never leaves.

Meet Ume & Bitter

Our one umeshu, then. The drinks menu lists it as Ume & Bitter, and describes it in its own words: “bright perilla sweetness meets the gentle bitterness of gentian. Crisp, lively, and full of character.”

The build, as printed: gin, gentian, umeshu, pink perilla.

The menu also tags it, as it tags every signature cocktail, and this one reads sweet, bitter, herbal and strength. Tags, not measurements — we are not going to turn a graphic into a number.

What the drink is doing is straightforward once you see the parts. Umeshu on its own is sweet and fruity and would sit there being pleasant. Gentian is the bittering root behind a great many European aperitifs, and it is aggressively, medicinally bitter in a way that cuts sugar cleanly. Gin brings the juniper and the backbone. So the umeshu is not the star here, it is the sweetness and the fruit that the bitterness has something to argue with.

That is an honest description of a construction, not a claim that it is the best cocktail in Singapore. Our bar has always been more interested in ideas than in superlatives, which is roughly the argument in fun dining, not fine dining.

The perilla is not a coincidence

Here is the detail worth knowing, because it makes the drink read completely differently once you have it.

Red perilla — akajiso, the same family as the shiso leaf you have had with sashimi — is the traditional partner to ume. It is what gets packed in with umeboshi during pickling, and it is where that startling pink-red colour comes from. Ume and red perilla have been sitting in the same jars in Japan for centuries.

So a cocktail that puts pink perilla next to umeshu is not a fusion flourish. It is the oldest possible partner for that fruit, arriving in a cocktail instead of a pickling crock. Which is more or less the whole thesis of this restaurant — the ideas are traditional, the format is not — and the same instinct is at work across the food, as we set out in what Japanese-Middle Eastern fusion actually means here.

What we do not do with it

Umeshu is not a pour on our menu — not neat, not on the rocks, and not stretched with soda, which is the way most of Japan actually drinks it. One cocktail is the whole of our relationship with this liqueur, and if you came in specifically wanting a long, cold, fruity umeshu highball, we are not the place tonight.

That is worth saying plainly rather than letting you find out at the table. If you want to know what those serves are, how they differ and what to ask for in a bar that does stock it properly, we have written that out in umeshu soda, highball or rocks.

The practical bits

No price, from us: our menus do not print drinks prices at all, so ask when you sit down. And no alcohol percentage either — umeshu varies enormously bottle to bottle, ours is not printed on anything, and a made-up figure helps nobody. For the general shape of what an evening here costs, we have written that honestly.

Dietary, since Middle Eastern food invites the question: this is alcohol, and our kitchen serves pork. Habibi-san is not halal. Everything else people usually ask is in our FAQ.

If umeshu has sent you down the rabbit hole of Japanese drinks generally, the two useful next reads are sake versus shochu — shochu being the spirit umeshu is classically steeped in — and how to drink sake. The strangest bottle we stock, meanwhile, turns up in a glass, a dessert and a cocktail, and gets its own piece: Sakari Matcha Junmai. The wider case for why a room like ours keeps a list like ours is in our izakaya guide.

Otherwise: come and drink the one we do have. You can see the room and the counter in our gallery, the rest of the food on our menu, and you can book a table at 29 Hamilton Road for any evening from Tuesday to Sunday.