Edible Food Find: Wicked Bess
Photos by Adam DeTour
“When I first discovered what a shrub was, the idea of drinking vinegar seemed really odd to me,” says Will Caines. “I wasn’t expecting it to be as pleasant as it was.” For the past few years, through his company Wicked Bess, he’s been spreading that revelation.
Caines’s line of small-batch shrubs can be purchased on his website and from purveyors including Arlington’s Prep Neighborhood Kitchen, Boston’s Dray Drinks and Melrose’s Beacon Hill Wine and Gourmet (a list he hopes to grow with the acquisition of a wholesale license). Most sales, however, come through face-to-face encounters at farmers markets. This summer, he’ll be offering samples to marketgoers in Belmont, Lexington, Melrose, Wakefield and Winchester and fielding their most common question: “What is this?”
The simple answer is that shrubs are concoctions of fruit, vinegar and sugar, typically used in cocktails in place of citrus. Part of the fascination for Caines lies in shrubs’ history, which goes back in the United States to colonial times, when farmers would refresh themselves with stream-cooled jugs of water laced with cider vinegar and molasses.
Raised in Medford by his Trinidadian immigrant parents, Caines likes to combine New England ingredients—like berries, maple and pears—with Caribbean-inspired flavors like ginger and chilis. The company’s tongue-in-cheek name proclaims his dual heritage: “Wicked” is a nod to Boston, while “Bess” is Caribbean slang for “awesome.”
“My flavor profile is a mix of those two worlds,” he says, recalling family outings to Walden Pond where they snacked on apples with pepper sauce. “There was always some type of sweet-and-spicy.” His shrubs echo that balance. To evoke his cousin’s version of a dish called chow chow, for example, he created a tongue-tingling blend of pineapple, lime, mandarin and habanero.
Caines entered the food world in 2011, after the abrupt collapse of the online poker industry cut off what had been his primary source of income. He encountered shrubs while working as the lead bartender at now-shuttered Greek restaurant Doretta, and by 2020, he was experimenting with new shrub recipes for a bar he and a friend planned to open.
“Then Covid hit,” Caines recalls. “It gave me a ton of free time, and my recipe development went into hyperdrive.”
He launched Wicked Bess in 2021 out of Food rEvolution, a commercial kitchen in Stoneham. Sharing the space with other small businesses brings welcome camaraderie to an otherwise solo endeavor, and he credits Food rEv owner Lisa Farrell for the nudge he needed to get the company off the ground.
“She’s the first person that got me to go to the farmers markets,” he says. “Once I got in front of people, I was, like: ‘Oh, this isn’t so hard, this is going to work.’”
Caines designs his flavors to harmonize with a variety of spirits—blackberry with bourbon and grapefruit with mezcal are two of his favorite combinations—but market regulars clued him in to an even broader appeal.
“I was shocked at how many people would come back to the table saying they were drinking them as mocktails,” he says. Many customers simply splash them into sparkling water. Upon reflection, he thinks he understands why. “The vinegar gives you a certain burn,” he observes. So do ginger and peppers, mainstays of the Wicked Bess sweet-and-spicy playbook. “All of these components add this element of heat that you would get from alcohol.”
Caines’ poker mind-set—as he puts it, “the ego to play at a certain level and allow the results to dictate where your next level is”—has helped him navigate the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. So does the memory of his mother, who died in 2006.
“I had a moment after she passed when I felt like I was able to communicate with her, and the message was that mistakes are OK,” he says. “Internalizing that message has propelled me through this journey.”
