Incense Gum? Reviewing the Viral Nathan and Sons Underbrush Remineralizing Gum

Maybe this is just my algorithm, but I just can’t escape Nathan and Sons Underbrush Remineralizing Gum on Instagram. In case your feed isn’t absolutely inundated with Underbrush content like mine, Underbrush is a chewing gum brand that uses natural botanicals rather than the, well, plastic that is commonly used as a gum base. Instead, Underbrush contains chicle, mastic, spruce, and acacia gum, myrrh and other natural ingredients. Are you beginning to see why I’m interested in the stuff? Some of these ingredients might sound more at home in an incense build than something you put in your mouth, but the truth is that plant gums have been chewed for centuries. Hell, people died over mastic in antiquity, such was its acclaim as a herbal medicine, flavoring, and chewing gum. Native Americans used spruce gum in this way, and frankincense has also traditionally been used as a chewing gum.

Naturally, I had to try a gum made, essentially, out of incense materials. The price deterred me for a while, but my curiosity eventually won out. I elbowed my way through the aggressive salesy cruft on the Nathan and Sons website and put in an order for the berry variety (the only vegan option).

Of course I put the stuff on my dusty wee heater.

Underbrush as intended: gum

With a texture nigh-indistinguishable from any gum you might find on a supermarket shelf, I found Underbrush pleasantly sweet with a mild berry flavor as I began to chew. Unfortunately, this only lasts for, quite literally, seconds before settling down into an ashtray meets lapsang-souchong smoky black tea flavor. It’s genuinely pretty shocking how quickly the flavor changes. I can only assume that the lingering note comes from the myrrh. It really is quite unfortunate that this is the only resin with any flavor left in it—myrrh is infamous for its bitter flavor[1].

In the ads for this gum, they show the resins being heated in order to mix them together, and I can’t help but wonder whether that’s the culprit here. With plain old frankincense or mastic, the pronounced flavor of the resin lasts for just about as long as you can be bothered to chew. As an incense maker, I am well aware of how quickly heat can evaporate out all of those lovely aromatic volatile compounds—even now I’m grinding some costus root twenty seconds at a time, ensuring that the temperature of the material doesn’t rise beyond 100°F with an infrared thermometer. I don’t really care about the berry flavor, but it seems like abject sacrilege to have all of these nice, rare, and expensive tree resins in a product with their flavor cooked out of them.

After spending close to $40 for 36 pieces of gum, my disappointment is immeasurable. That said, I didn’t buy the stuff just to chew it all anyway. If it’s no good as a gum, how will it fare as incense?

Underbrush as not intended: incense

At 185°C the gum presents a candy-like sweetness and a fruity acidity with maybe a tiny hint of mastic? Imagine a bag of skittles left in a hot car. The fragrance didn’t change at 250°, but at 300° a toasty note enters and the acidity ramps up before it begins to darken in color and smell burned.

Even as incense, the resins are practically nowhere to be found. What a shame.

Conclusion

I’m not at all enamored with this stuff. While the gum circumvents the usual issues inherent to chewing resin with its excellent texture, all of those beautiful natural ingredients present little to no flavor. The added flavoring disappears so quickly that it may as well not be there. I can’t speak to the health claims made by Nathan and Sons, but in purely sensory terms, I prefer the stuff on an incense heater. And I don’t like it much there.

On an emotional level, cooking the flavor out of these beautiful resins—precious materials that wars have been fought over —feels like an Ecce Homo moment. Continuing on the religious theme, perhaps more apt is the famous line from the Gospel of Matthew: “…neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet….” Whether you’re looking for something to chew or a fragrance to enjoy, my recommendation would be to use a chunk of mastic instead.

1. Honestly, it’s quite difficult to make myrrh smell nice in incense too. ↩︎