Hong Kong Spirits: Magnolia Lab’s Herbal Experiment

It’s late on a Friday evening at Tai On, the 57-year-old cha chaan teng on Canton Road that has been reinvented as a contemporary café. Except this isn’t really Tai On: it’s Clan and Company Community Bar, a new watering hole that occupies the café’s space from 7pm to 2am. 

“Do you want to try something special?” asks an effusive server, dressed in an oversized white shirt like those worn by cha chaan teng waiters. She opens two bottles of what appear to be herbal tonics and pours them into teacups. “This one is made with magnolia,” she explains. “And this one is made with roselle.”

It’s the house specialty: two liqueurs made by Magnolia Lab from ingredients that would be familiar to anyone who drinks leung cha, the cooling tea meant to rebalance the body’s qi. They find their way into many of Clan and Company’s cocktails, teaming up with locally-distilled gin, Italian bitters and other ingredients to create bittersweet drinks that evoke a long tradition of herbal tonics with roots in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). 

“Cocktails are about culture and history,” says Dennis Mak, the co-founder of both Clan and Company and Magnolia Lab. And the particular culture he is trying to convey is the Chinese flavours that have long been associated with health but not the enjoyment of sharing a few drinks with friends in a lively bar. “A lot of people have never appreciated it before,” he says. “They have never really thought about it when they taste it. Because it’s medicine.” 

Yet that’s also the origin of the amari and bitters that are standard in most bars, from Campari to Fernet Branca to Jägermeister: they were originally consumed as medicine. It’s something that Mak was pondering several years ago when he left his job as an investment banker and began working as a bartender in Little Lab, a now-defunct cocktail bar on Staunton Street. One of his regular customers was James Ting, an old high school classmate who had become a TCM specialist.

“We hadn’t seen each other in a long time, but he loves cocktails,” says Mak. “It’s weird that you have a Chinese medicine practitioner loving cocktails, appreciating the flavours. So we talked in the bar and obviously he had a lot of things in mind. Even before meeting me, he had some ideas on how to turn TCM into more of a lifestyle rather than medicine.”

Herbal concoctions… on a junk

Around that time, Mak and some friends purchased an old wooden junk in Aberdeen Harbour that they were renting out for events. It was the perfect place to store the various alcohol infusions he was making with Ting. 

“We infused a lot of old Chinese medicine recipes,” says Mak. “After a year, we realised we had a bottle that tasted really good. The flavour kept changing in your mouth and it lasted for five, six, seven seconds. There were all the different flavours in it: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and spicy. That was the original form of Magnolia.” 

There’s a long history of herbal wine being made in Hong Kong, but Mak wanted to update it for more contemporary tastes. After a few tweaks they ended up with a final recipe based around magnolia berries, aged tangerine peel, mulberries and sandalwood macerated in two different types of Chinese spirits: mijiu, made from glutinous rice, and baijiu, made from sorghum. Packaged at 29% alcohol by volume, it’s a complex tipple that tastes a bit like a whisky that got lost in a Chinese medicine shop. 

The second infusion that proved successful was Roselle, a 19% concoction that showcases roselle, red date, dried ginger and Chinese angelica. At once tart, fruity and spicy, with a sweetness moderated by the astringency of the roselle, it plays the role of an apéritif not dissimilar to Pimm’s, Aperol or Portuguese ginjinha, but with a decidedly Chinese profile of flavours. “The angelica root is definitely the highlight of Roselle,” says Mak. “It’s a herb that you always have in hot pot, in soup, in bak kut teh — Asian cuisine.”

All the while he and his old schoolmate were perfecting their recipes, Mak was motivated by something at home: a huge jar of custom-made Chinese herbal wine ordered by his mother in 1998. He explains it is a tradition for many families to commission their own vat of tonic for future consumption — to help the body recover from giving birth, for instance, or to ward off the effects of old age. “It’s made with different herbs and animals, like deer horn, frogs, that kind of thing,” says Mak. “I realised it’s amazing because this jar actually grew old with me. It was always there, I just never thought about it.”

Satisfied with their recipes, Mak and Ting launched Magnolia Lab in 2020, packaging their liqueurs in embossed 380 millilitre bottles that manage to look at once vintage and contemporary. 

A tonic for what ails you

Needless to say, 2020 was not a good time to start a business. Especially one that relied on potential customers gathering in bars and restaurants. It didn’t help that bartenders and mixologists, confronted by an entirely new kind of liqueur, didn’t know how to use it. “Even we didn’t know how to use it, at the time,” says Mak. 

Slowly, though, they found a following. Some of the bartenders they knew began developing recipes with the liqueurs. Last summer, to celebrate Magnolia Lab’s fifth anniversary, they held a pop-up — a “guest shift” in cocktail parlance — at Tai Wo Tang, a café housed in a Chinese dispensary that originally opened in 1932. Mixologist Matthew Lau Wai-tip developed a special cocktail based on the five elements of TCM — earth, wood, fire, metal and water. It was a hit. 

“We thought, ‘Hopefully we’ll have 20 or 30 people every night,’” recalls Mak. “We got 60 people. Every day, every night, full house. It was the first time we really talked to people, explained the brand. And the majority of the people, they didn’t know about us. But they appreciated the flavour because the cocktails were so good.”

That led to another guest shift, this time at Tai On, with a range of cocktails featuring two locally distilled gins, N.I.P and Two Moons, and a third, Perfume Tree, made in the Netherlands with Hong Kong botanicals. “That was probably the first time you saw that at an event — three gin brands and one liqueur brand, all from Hong Kong,” says Mak. 

It was an even bigger success than the guest shift at Tai Wo Tang. “It was really beyond our expectations,” says Mak. “So we talked to Tai On and said, ‘How about we just keep doing this?”

That was last September. Clan and Company has been open five nights a week since then, serving up a menu of drinks unlike any other in Hong Kong. There are herbal tea cocktails, plus a lager brewed with Chinese herbs and spices by Young Master. There are cocktails made with seasonal fruits. And then there is a selection of cocktails inspired by classic cha chaan teng drinks like watercress honey and lemon Ribena.

“It’s a good vibe,” says Mak. “It’s a place you really feel like you’re in Hong Kong.”

Big ambitions

Less than half a year after opening in Tai On, Clan and Company has already expanded: this time to Harbour City, where at the beginning of 2026, they took over Michelin starred French restaurant Épure’s vast seaview terrace. 

Dubbed Clan and Company Lounge, it takes a similar approach as the cha chaan teng bar, but with more of the glamour of 1980s Hong Kong. There’s even a savoury cocktail, the Golden Broth, inspired by shark’s fin — though don’t worry, no sharks were harmed in making it. (It’s a mix of Magnolia, rice wine, chicken consommé, imitation shark fin, cream, milk and steamed rice.) 

Mak is the first to admit that there is not much of a tradition of using Chinese herbal tea or tonic wines in cocktails, but every tradition needs to start somewhere. “Just look at milk tea,” he says. “It was obviously influenced by the British. But we made it something different. It’s no longer their culture — it’s our culture. We want to do that with cocktails. It’s a Western thing, but now we’ve made it a Hong Kong thing.”