The renowned British author Rudyard Kipling spent time in Chicago in 1889, and did not mince words.
“Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.”
133 years later, Food and Wine magazine offered this introduction to a Chicago phenomenon that some might accuse of committing olfactory savagery.
“’(Malört) is a rite of passage,’ my father once said, ‘though I’m not sure to what.’ It occupies the rare air of popular city-specific beverages that both connote pride and are widely perceived as being bad…(it is) off-putting.”
However, the publication also describes Jeppson’s Malört Liqueur as “excellent,” yielding a balanced and almost benign assessment of the liquid, considering some of the flavor descriptors that have been bestowed on it through the decades: pencil shavings, old battery rust, citrus zest, ear wax, cigar ash, singed eyebrows, and Liquid Plumber.
In seeking to make sense of it all, an undisputed highlight of my 2024 year in books and readings was Chicago journalist Josh Noel’s epochal Malört: The Redemption of a Revered and Reviled Spirit. It is difficult to imagine Malört’s eclectic tale being told any better than this — and what an amazing story it is.
To be sure, I did not come to the topic of Malört entirely uninformed, viewing it quite vaguely as a bizarre if ill-defined throwback of an alcoholic beverage, one strangely yet intimately linked with the city of Chicago.
Some jaundiced observers might suggest that my use of “defined” adds an extraneous word to the mix.
But until I read Noel’s book I never knew exactly why or how this identification of spirit to city came about. I’m the first to concede that my visits to Chicago, while always enjoyable, have been far too few in number. My travel budget typically is allocated to Europe, implying more frequent exposure to O’Hare International as a handy transit point than greater experience with the city itself.
Accordingly, and serendipitously, the first time I ever tasted Malört was at a bar in Chicago early in the evening of Wednesday, November 16, 2022. I remember the exact date not because of the Malört, but owing to the concert my friend and I were preparing to attend: Manic Street Preachers and Suede at the Auditorium Theatre.
Revealed as out-of-towner rubes passing through Chicago for the show, the bartender did what has come naturally to countless generations of his ever-helpful brethren, and offered us gratis shots...Read more
