Malört is, in one word, unforgiving. Made from neutral spirits, wormwood and sugar, it tastes a little like sucking dandelion juice through a straw made of car tires. It is also kind of good. Intensely bitter, it’s herbaceous and a touch citrusy, as if you were to bite a grapefruit like an apple.
It is also, in five words, the unofficial liquor of Chicago.
Carl Jeppson, a Swedish immigrant to the city, peddled Jeppson’s Malört as a digestif as early as the 1930s. “It was the only liquor to survive Prohibition because no one believed that a human being would drink that on purpose, and that it had to be medicinal,” said J.W. Basilo, the manager of the Promontory and a bartender in Chicago for more than 20 years.
Around a decade ago, career bartenders like Mr. Basilo began embracing Malört as a symbol of industry cool. They liked that it was only 35 percent alcohol by volume, so you could down several shots in a shift and still manage to count change.
Locals liked that it had an unfriendly edge, and that you could get it only in Chicago. Tasting of citrus pith and pencil shavings, it became the designated initiation shot, something you downed to prove your Midwest mettle — a difficult drink for a difficult place to live.
But in recent years, Malört has built a following in seemingly unlikely locales, popping up in cities like Seattle, New Orleans and Denver, as a devoted group of Malört evangelists takes the dispiriting spirit a little more seriously.
In just over a decade, the drink has gone from being sold exclusively in Illinois to checkering back bars across 33 states. Malört was first distributed outside of Illinois in 2013, to Wisconsin, and then to four more states and the District of Columbia five years later when CH Distillery bought the brand from Pat Gabelick, who owned it for 20 years. In 2018, distribution outside of Illinois accounted for only 6 percent of total Malört sales. Today, that number is 37 percent.
But some bartenders and fans are concerned that the liquor is losing the down-home energy that made it popular. “When it went national, it stopped being a quirky local secret,” Mr. Basilo said, “and turned into the kind of thing annoying tourists ask about.” You can take Malört out of the Midwest, but can you take the Midwest out of Malört?
At Pepp’s Pub in New Orleans, the only self-described “Malört-centric bar” in the United States, everyone gets a free Malört initiation shot. Hundreds of Malört die-hards flock to the pub each July for “Malörtigras,” a Mardi Gras parody event the owner Sam Wurth has hosted for five years.
Mr. Wurth, who tended bar in Chicago for 10 years before moving down South, takes Polaroids of Malört first-timers and asks them to write descriptions of the drink on the border. Hundreds of snapshots plaster the walls of the bar’s two bathrooms. A sampling of their tiny captions: “Swamp grass in July,” “Pain” and, Mr. Wurth’s favorite, “The powder inside of a balloon.” Malört turns even the most prosaic into unexpected poets.
The seltzer revolution has significantly altered bar culture’s DNA, he said, as customers are drinking less and choosing prepackaged beverages more often. As a consequence, bars have lost some of the charm that once made them communal spaces. Malört inspires the sort of Schadenfreude that gets people talking again. “One of my favorite things is when people try Malört for the first time, all of the other bar regulars will look at them and then laugh or react,” Mr. Wurth said. “It just makes people a part of a community.”
Even as the Malört diaspora grows, its reputation as a conversation starter would seem to cement it as a uniquely Midwestern liquor. What could be more Heartland than wanting to chat up every patron at the bar?
For most of its lifetime, Malört was known only as something your grandfather knocked back with his buddies at the local dive. It is a type of Swedish besk, and for years it survived on the paychecks of Chicago’s large communities of Scandinavian and Eastern European immigrants, according to Josh Noel, a journalist and author of the book “Malört: The Redemption of a Revered and Reviled Spirit.”
This association with an old-school, working-class slice of the Midwest is one reason Malört has done so well in Seattle, said Dustin Haarstad, who owns the punk and metal bar Black Cat there. “Ever since this massive gentrification of my hometown, I think there’s been this cry out for some sort of attachment to a more roughneck, blue collar mentality that was Seattle for so long,” he said. “I think that Malört just really sings that song.”
Black Cat has the somewhat dubious distinction of being the first bar in the country to put Malört on tap. Still, you won’t find many ordering a Malört cocktail in Seattle — or anywhere else for that matter. Despite Malört’s rise, it remains a shot you down alongside a cold, local beer — a pairing known as a Chicago Handshake.
Despite worries that the drink would lose its edge as it went national, Malört continues to cut through the cocktail cacophony, offering a bitter but refreshingly relaxed counterpoint to the highbrow mixology popularized over the last two decades.
Outside of Chicago, Honore Club in Bushwick, Brooklyn, may be the only place you can try the closest thing to a signature Malört cocktail: the Hard Sell, a mix of Malört, gin, lemon and elderflower liqueur.
Stepping inside Honore Club is like stumbling into your hometown’s V.F.W. hall, all wood paneling and Formica countertops. The Bushwick bar is emblematic of a sort of Midwest cultural renaissance. It seems no coincidence that Malört’s star is rising as Chappelle Roan, one of the year’s biggest pop stars, claims the title of “Midwest princess,” and “The Bear” spawns myriad Italian beef pop-ups. In uncertain times, people crave coziness and a Midwest sincerity. People want Malört.
Mr. Wurth, the bar owner in New Orleans, doesn’t seem too concerned about the drink losing its Midwestern ethos as it crosses state lines, nor does he worry about it fully breaking into the mainstream. Malört’s unique astringency will weed out fake fans, he said, and keep the drink on the back bar and off the cocktail menu. “Malört isn’t Taylor Swift. Malört is the Ramones. Both are awesome, but they’re different awesome.”
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