What is Malört? | Wine Enthusiast

An Under-the-Radar Specialty

Malört is a stunningly bitter, herbaceous digestif originally from Sweden, where it was used for centuries in traditional medicine. It was widely consumed to remedy a variety of digestive ailments, including nausea, due to its key ingredient: wormwood. As the plant’s scientific name, Artemisia absinthium, suggests, the perennial herb is also used in a more familiar spirit, absinthe.

Like thousands of other Swedes, Carl Jeppson emigrated to Chicago in the 1930s and began making malört nearly identical to the drink he enjoyed back home. He soon discovered a market for the liqueur in his predominantly Swedish neighborhood surrounding the intersection of Clybourn Avenue and Division Street, and peddled his namesake spirit door-to-door.

In 1935, at age 70, he sold the brand to local liquor executive George Brode.

“[Brode] found Malört completely distasteful, but he knew there was an audience for it—blue collar workers and shift workers,” explains Josh Noel, author of newly released Malört: The Redemption of a Revered and Reviled Spirit.

Jeppson’s Malört experienced lackluster but sustainable sales until its heyday in the 60s and early 70s, says Noel: “Its peak was in 1973, when he sold almost 4,000 cases.” After that, sales declined annually. If it slipped away into obscurity, few would have noticed. “It was this weird bottle on the back bars across Chicago,” says Noel.

The business was so small that when Brode died in 1999, he left Jeppson’s Malört to his legal secretary and sole remaining employee, Patricia Gabelick.

But the digestif still had its loyalists.

Toby Maloney, author of The Bartender’s Manifesto: How to Think, Drink and Create Cocktails Like a Pro and head mixologist of The Violet Hour in Wicker Park, a James Beard Award winner in the “Outstanding Bar” category, has poured his fair share of the drink.

In 1990, he was bartending on Division Street, which he describes as “pretty rough and tumble” at the time. Jeppson’s Malört was the “go to” drink. “You drank Old Style beers and shots of malört,” he says. “It used to be the joke shot or the punishment shot for a lot of people.”

This was years before the cocktail revolution began to spread across U.S. cities. Palates were less adventurous, less exotic. “We didn’t know what amaros were,” says Maloney. “There was a small contingent in San Francisco drinking Fernet-Branca and ginger ale, but other than that, that flavor profile really wasn’t a thing.”

Novelty to Nuanced

In an unexpected turn, the bäsk liqueur (any Swedish-style liquor flavored with wormwood or anise) was resuscitated with the birth of the mixology movement of the early 2000s.

“[Malört] had a few things going for it,” says Noel. “It had a really interesting, strong, memorable flavor with a point of view. It had decades of history behind it, because ‘local’ became a big thing in this whole movement and then it also had this other really powerful thing going for it, which is nebulous but you know it when you see it—and that’s authenticity.”

With the explosion of social media, sales soared further. In 2017, the company sold eight times as much Malört as it did in 2007.

In 2018, Gabelick sold the Carl Jeppson Company to CH Distillery, which now makes the digestif at its 50,000-square-foot distillery in Chicago’s historic Pilsen neighborhood.

Case in point? Jeppson’s Malört has evolved from novelty to phenomena. Malört merchandise and even tattoos featuring the three-star crest displayed on Jeppson’s Malört bottles—a fixture since nearly its inception—have become de rigueur throughout the city. In short, the spirit seems to be woven permanently into Chicago’s distinct cultural tapestry.

A Polarizing Potable

Nearly a century after its U.S. introduction, Malört’s earthy, herbal and petrol-like taste remains the same. Depending on who you ask, this can be a good thing or a bad thing.

Chicago Magazine called it the city’s “most reviled shot” in 2014. And “malört face,” the visceral reaction that manifests as the scowl or distorted wince a person makes whilst downing a shot, is so well-known that #malörtface has more than 5,000 tags on Instagram.

“The wormwood imparts a lot of bitterness and a lot of astringency, and that creates really dramatic reactions to the drink,” concedes Noel. “It’s a real poke in the ribs.”

Indeed, the caramel-colored liquid is pungent from the first pour, and the aroma wholly captures its bitterness. A mild sweetness from added sugar hints at citrus notes, often described as resembling grapefruit pith. It makes the aggressive flavor hard to shake.

“The finish is what kills you,” says Maloney. “Tequila and whiskey and such will go away within a minute. Usually, five, seven minutes later, you can still taste Malört.”

Aaron Goldfarb, author of Dusty Booze: In Search of Vintage Spirits, first tried Jeppson’s Malört’s in the early 2010s when visiting friends in Chicago. “After a night of drinking, they served me this unnamed shot as a rite of local passage,” he recalls.

The flavor reminded him of the Italian amari that was having a renaissance in New York at the time. Overall, he says, it wasn’t bad. “Just about all cultures in world history have some form of aggressively-flavored spiced digestif,” he says. “The Italians have amaro. The French have Chartreuse. The Greeks have ouzo. And Chicago has Jeppson’s Malört.”

Love it or hate it, Windy City locals unabashedly claim Jeppson’s Malört as their own, and mixologists like Maloney give credit where credit is due.

“Chicagoans who’ve lived through the winters are used to a certain amount of embracing the harshness,” he says with a hearty laugh. “It takes a city with big shoulders to hoist that particular spirit over and over again.”

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Published: September 4, 2024