what is jeppson's malort?

The bitter liquor’s origin can be traced back to Carl Jeppson, who immigrated from Sweden to Chicago in the mid-1880s, according to Malört’s website.

By the 1920s, Jeppson started to produce Malört — his take on bäsk brännvin, a Scandinavian liquor distilled from potatoes, grain or wood. He skirted Prohibition regulations by marketing it as a “medicinal” product that could rid the body of stomach worms and other parasites.

Although Jeppson had a cigar shop in the city, Prohibition also forced him to sell his drink door-to-door, or even out of a suitcase on the sidewalk, according to a previous Sun-Times report. By the end of Prohibition, Malört had enough of a reputation that Jeppson was able to sell the formula for the drink with his name attached to it.

And while production of the liquor has shifted from Chicago to Kentucky to Florida and back, its name and notoriety among Chicagoans has remained.

So we asked Sun-Times readers to tell us how they would describe the taste of Malört to someone who’s never had it before.

More than a thousand responses poured in, ranging from creative to disgusting to very, very Chicago. Instead of suffering through a shot of it yourself, read these descriptions that’ll have you wincing anyway.

“It’s a baby aspirin wrapped in a rubber band rolled in pencil shavings and covered with bug spray.” — Tom Kief

“It’s like if shame and regret were left to ferment before being distilled through an old, sweaty shoe.” — Nora Rose Allen

“Pure, unbridled hatred. Like Skittles drenched in gasoline, stuffed into a sock. Then someone beats you to death with that sock. Like how getting dumped in high school feels.” — Mike Amarilio

“Sweat squeezed out of hockey pants then aged for five years the poured on hockey pants squeezed out and aged another five years in a keg tub left over from a frat party that a cat drowned in.” — Mike Smolarek

“Imagine rotten grapefruit with the lingering after taste of a tire fire. Pretty much that.” — Karen Rose

“It’s tastes like when you go camping and walk past someone putting on bug spray and you catch it fully in the mouth. Also grapefruit.” — Tiela Halpin-Moss

“When I was a kid in the 60s we would chase the bug sprayer truck and inhaled the DDT. It tastes like that mixed with licorice.” — Thomas McInerney

“I did several shots of this one trip and decided it tastes like a forest fire, if the forest was made of ear wax.” — Brittany Benson

“Gasoline on the rocks with a twist of regret.” — Gloria Chevere

“It tastes like you mowed the lawn with your face.” — Nick Wright

“You know that taste in your mouth when you have food poisoning and there is nothing else left to vomit except stomach acid?” — Tim David

“It’s like french-kissing a desk from Ikea.” — Lindsey Monroe-Bougher

“Tastes like the Chicago River.” — Patrick John Kane

“Gasoline served in a dirty ashtray.” — Paul Scott

“A slap in the face followed by a warm hug.” — Sara Bergs

“Hipster tears that have been left in the trunk of your Corolla through all of Chicago’s seasons.” — Maritza Lilliebridge

“Like the Dan Ryan Expressway.” — Sean Seamus Somers

“It tastes like old spice mixed with basil. It is tart and makes your mouth feel dry and pinched. It leaves a hint of dried orange peels and newly mowed grass on your tongue.” — Niclas Fohlin

“Imagine doing a shot of vinegar mixed with pickle juice and turpentine.” — Jim Lewis

“Like a stale fart mixed with the juice at the bottom of a dumpster in August.” — Ole Campos

“Like a fermented jolly rancher.” – Brenda Torres-Figueroa

“Nail polish remover.” — Pat Pfaller

“Potpourri and rubbing alcohol.” — Liz Allen

“It tastes like if you took a baby’s soiled diaper after they’ve eaten a jar of cigarettes soaked in liquid smoke, ring it out and get the juices from the said diaper. Mix the juice with the yoke of a rotting egg and strain it through a dirty jockstrap soaked in liver and onions for no less than one year. Absorb the fluid from the mixture in a high school boy’s sock following an August football practice. Bury the sock under the nearest chicken coop overnight. Remove one ounce of fluid with an eyedropper and place it under your tongue. That taste is just a little better than one shot of Malort.” — Thomas Cairns

“It’s like being forced to down Elmer’s glue by grade school bullies with an aftertaste of candle wax.” — Walter Brzeski

“It tastes like crying alone in a bathroom stall.” — Sean McGill

“Throwing up in your mouth then swallowing.” — Bob Abplanalp

“I describe it as taking a full ashtray off the table, dumping the cigarette butts out and licking off all the ash that’s caked on the ashtray. I also add: ‘You should try it!’ in a really cheerful voice after that description.” — Anthony Velasquez

“Pencil shavings and depression.” — Richard Hunt

“Earwax and shame.” — Jessi Tully

“It tastes fine, then suddenly tastes like someone filtered vodka through burning garbage and finished it with smoke from a tire fire.” — Michael C. Krauss

“Lysol disinfectant blended with hops and bug spray.” — Debra Rose

“Tastes like victory.” — Frank Nova

“Take an old Christmas tree with the lights still plugged in and soak that in grain alcohol for a week, strain through a hay bale.” — BJ Levy

“The love child of licorice and rotting cabbage.” — Chuck Boswell

“Licking the bottom of a well-worn Doc Marten after eating the rind of a grapefruit.” — Becca Cleeland

“Batteries with a splash of gasoline and some burnt rubber on top.” — Monse Rizo

“Take an old, soggy running shoe, fill it with sweat, underarm perspiration, under boob sweat and belly button juice with a shot of toe-cheese.” — Yeni Marlen

“Rotten grapefruit rubbed in motor oil.” — Lisa Streitmatter

“It’s the year 2020 in a bottle.” — Tom Kief

Malört occupies the rare air of popular city-specific beverages that both connote pride and are widely perceived as being bad. Are there even any others? When else has a city said both "this defines us" and "this is terrible" about the same liquid? Over the years, I've heard people describe Malört as "citrus-flavored gasoline," "the regional prank beverage," "burnt vinyl car-seat condensation," "the vile flower liquor," "pure peer pressure," "the bad thing," "hipster virtue-signaling juice," and more. Malört's foul novelty has long acted as the prompt for an informal, vocabulary-rich Chicago party game best titled, "Describe The Singular Experience of Consuming Malört."

"It's a rite of passage," my father once said, "though I'm not sure to what." Introduced to Chicago in the 1930s by Swedish immigrant Carl Jeppson, Malört is distilled in the mode of a classical Nordic brännvin, which is made from potatoes, grains, or wood cellulose. Yet Malört itself has only wormwood as a flavoring component, and without much else to cut or cover it, the results are predictably funky. Wormwood, after all, is the most infamous ingredient in absinthe, and for a long time it was rumored to cause hallucinations.

Carl Jeppson was a Chicago cigar-shop owner who began selling his concoction to businesses and private citizens, often out of a suitcase on the sidewalk, during Prohibition. Because nothing about it was overtly pleasurable, Malört was easily masked as medicine…which made it quasi-legal to sell during those dark years. Jeppson's current director of marketing Sam Mechling says that when police officers would take Jeppson himself aside to interrogate him about the legality of his liquid, he would offer them shots and, stanky-faced after they took them, they would agree that what he was selling was not a recreational good. Mechling also tells of Jeppson's nearly constant use of cigars; the entrepreneur smoked so many that his taste buds were scorched and numbed, the theory goes, and the extreme kick to the palate that Malört causes was among the few things he could reliably taste.

MAKE: Aromatic Bitters

By the time the Volstead Act was repealed and bars could again be legally tended, Malört had become well-known enough as a party-trolling tool in Chicago that Jeppson was able to sell the formula for his product, with his name attached to it. Unfortunately, like Franz Kafka and Vincent van Gogh before him, Jeppson never got to experience much of the financial success of his magic, despite the fact that his name is still attached to the concoction.

In the decades following the end of Prohibition, Malört lived in relative anonymity—more of a niche product than anything else, a Chicago insider's drinking secret. In the 1970s, the Jeppson's factory in Chicago relocated to Florida, but in 2019, following the company's acquisition by CH Distillery the year before, it came back to the Windy City, where production remains headquartered today.

Business has been good: Mechling says that since around 2008—which is when Malört became the stuff of memes, essentially—business for Jeppson's has expanded. It was at this time that a "Malört Face" channel that chronicled the countenances of first-time drinkers on the image-hosting site Flickr went viral, inspiring a curiosity that has only grown since. Today, the #malortface hashtag has more than 5,000 posts on Instagram.

Growth was significant enough that a trademark battle ensued over the commercial use of the word "Malört." Local distilleries Letherbee and FEW made their own takes on Malört (which are, frankly, far too enjoyable to stake a proper place in the tradition signified by the noun they were using) and were subsequently hit with cease-and-desist letters from Jeppson's in 2014; they had, after all, trademarked the word in 2013. Neither distillery fought the trademark; Letherbee now calls theirs Bësk, while FEW cheekily called theirs Anguish and Regret (that one is no longer produced). Both derivatives formed part of the small, admirable movement to make Malört a more palatable ingredient in pricier cocktails.

As it's exploded in Chicago, Malört has become more available in other parts of the country, too. Hardcore Malört lovers in Chicago, however, might wish for their gem to stay local instead of spreading; there is always a careful, much-argued line that a viral product like this hovers around, subjectively dividing the value of obscurity from more widely shared enjoyment. Near this line is where non-believers accuse Malörtophiles of championing the liquid just to appear contrary and unique. Of course, no one can ever prove why someone else actually likes something, whether they order one drink over another because they appreciate how it tastes or simply for its social caché.

In any case, Malört's social presence has certainly risen. "It's harder and harder to find rubes who are unaware of it," Mechling says with a laugh. "Now you usually have to leave Chicago for the joy of sharing it for the first time, that thrilling moment of suspense. It's a weird way of showing affection for people," he says, "but it sort of exemplifies who we are as a city. It's rough at first, but you might grow to love it."

Jeppson's Malört is a brand of bäsk liquor, extremely low in thujone,[1] introduced in the 1930s, and long produced by Chicago's Carl Jeppson Company. In 2018, as its last employee was retiring, the brand was sold to CH Distillery of Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood.[2][3] Jeppson's Malört is named after Carl Jeppson, a Swedish immigrant who first distilled and popularized the liquor in Chicago. Malört (literally moth herb) is the Swedish word for wormwood,[4] which is the key ingredient in a bäsk, a bitter-flavored type of Swedish brännvin.

Malört is known for its bitter taste.[5][6][7] It can be found in some Chicago-area taverns and liquor stores, and is growing in popularity there, but is hard to find elsewhere in the United States.[4][8][9][10]

In the 1930s Carl Jeppson, a Swedish immigrant to Chicago, began marketing his homemade brew. He sold it from door to door for medicinal and other purposes, and one legend says he preferred the strong taste because years of smoking had dulled his taste-buds.[11] Attorney George Brode purchased the original recipe from Jeppson[8] and created the famous Jeppson's Malört testimonial that once appeared on every bottle. Patricia Gabelick was hired by Brode as his secretary in 1966, and took over the business after Brode's death in 1999, running it out of her Lakeview apartment.[12]

It was made in Chicago until the mid-1970s, when the Mar-Salle[13] distillery that produced it for the Carl Jeppson Company closed. It was then made in Kentucky briefly, after which it was produced in Florida for many years.[14] In 2018, Jeppson's Malört was acquired by Chicago-based CH Distillery,[12] and in 2019 production was moved back to Chicago.[15]

While Gabelick acknowledged that the drink is a "niche liquor," selling a comparatively small number of cases annually, it has gained increased relevance among bartenders, bikers, and Chicago's southside community, where Gabelick notes that it has become "a rite of passage." The satirist John Hodgman has also adopted the drink in his stage show, offering shots to his audience.[16] In an interview with Gothamist blog Chicagoist, John Hodgman said Jeppson's Malört "tastes like pencil shavings and heartbreak."[17]

For many years, it was only sold in the Chicago area.[18] In summer 2013, Chicago bar Red Door featured Malört–infused snow cones (it has a summer tradition of serving snow cones doused with alcohol). The liquor is mixed with Benedictine and Angostura orange.[19] West Town's Hoosier Mama Pie Co. used Jeppson's in 2017 for "a meringue-style pie", called the Chicago Sunrise.[2]

In Joe Swanberg's 2013 film Drinking Buddies, drinking a shot of Malört is described as a Chicago tradition for erasing past mistakes.[20] In it, actor Jason Sudeikis' character riffs that Malört is like swallowing a burnt condom filled with gasoline.[20] In a similar vein, Tremaine Atkinson, founder of CH Distillery, was introduced to Malört when he first moved to Chicago, when he compared it to "taking a bite out of a grapefruit and then drinking a shot of gasoline".[12] Malört makes up half of the beer boilermaker called the Chicago Handshake (the other half is an Old Style beer).[21]

In August 2015, the High-Hat Club was voted Best Malört Bar in Chicago and was awarded the Carl Cup, a perpetual trophy that is passed from past to current champions in a manner similar to the Stanley Cup.[22]

While Malört is sometimes mistaken for the common name of the style of liquor, the word is the trademarked brand name owned by Carl Jeppson Company.[23] The company secured the trademark on November 3, 2015.[24] Other distillers that produced a similar spirit renamed theirs beforehand. Letherbee reverted to the generic "Bësk", while FEW Spirits dubbed theirs "Anguish and Regret".[25]

And if you have, you probably know it as "that drink that tastes like burnt carpet."

That's exactly the description my friends gave when presenting me with my first shot last summer, but I took it and thought that it tasted more like a light grapefruit liqueur up front with a Campari-like finish.

My reaction wasn't typical (there's a Flickr pool dedicated to documenting "Malört Face," the unpleasant reactions that people have when taking shots of Malört), but I love deeply bitter amari, so I wasn't surprised. And taking the shot sparked my interest in learning more about the liqueur.

Until a few years ago, Jeppson's Malört was consumed mostly at Swedish or Polish bars (the recipe is based on a Swedish spirit) or as a way to trick unassuming out-of-towners into taking a bitter shot. Then bartenders began to embrace it for its bitterness, and pretty soon, Jeppson's Malört was at almost every bar and appeared as an ingredient in lots of local cocktails. Recently, bartenders have been taking it a step further by making their own versions of Malört or adding the liqueur to bourbon barrels and aging it.

A few weeks ago, some cocktail-loving friends and I realized that by visiting just three bars in Wicker Park, we could try the original Jeppson's Malört, Malört schnapps made by Bittermens, a Malört made for The Violet Hour with Chicago's Letherbee Distillers, barrel-aged Malört, smoked Malört, Malört on tap, and eight Malört cocktails. So we did what any devoted Malört drinkers should do—set out on a bar crawl to sample everything in one long, boozy night.

But before I get to the results of the Great Malört Crawl of 2013, here's some background on the bitter liqueur.

Malört is a traditional Swedish spirit made with wormwood and other botanicals—Malört is Swedish for wormwood. In the 1930s, Carl Jeppson, a Swedish immigrant who moved to Chicago, started producing his own version of the bitter liqueur, called Jeppson's Malört.

To learn a bit about it, I sat down with the Carl Jeppson Company's owner Pat Gabelick, social networking director Sam Mechling, and historian Peter Strom to talk about the history of the bitter drink.

Gabelick took over the company after she worked for many years as a legal secretary to George Brode, who owned a liquor company, D.J. Bielzoff Products Co., that included Jeppson's Malört. He eventually sold off the other products but kept Malört around, even though he didn't drink it.

When I arrived at the bar, Gabelick was drinking a glass of white wine. "I drink Malört when I have to," she said. "It isn't something I would choose to drink every day. George said, 'instead of Campari and soda, drink Malört and soda.' George rarely drink it either, but he just loved it."

So who's Jeppson?

"There was a man named Carl Jeppson who brought the recipe to George," Gabelick said. "Carl went up and down Clark Street with a bottle, stopped in bars and poured shots for people, and began to market it. They had no connection to each other, except George owned a distillery and Carl wanted to sell his recipe."

The company moved production to Florida in the 1980s, since there were no distilleries left in Chicago. They briefly made Jeppson's in Kentucky, before starting at Florida Distillers in 1989. Despite the move, Jeppson's is still only sold in Chicago and around the suburbs.

Mechling, a comedian and bartender, took over the company's Twitter and Facebook accounts, and made YouTube videos about Malört.

"When someone does a shot of Malört, it produces comedy," Mechling said. "It turns people into poets, since they have to explain what it tastes like."

Mechling plays around with Malört at Paddy Long's bar, and he said, "if the goal is to mask the bitterness, swapping tequila with Malört to make a margarita is very nice." He made me a Malari—half Malört, half Campari—that managed to be nicely balanced, despite the strong bitterness.

Strom called Malört "one of those little fossilized pieces of culture left in Chicago. Malört went from this niche ethnic drink to a Chicago phenomenon," he said. Strom began researching the liqueur and got in touch with the Historical Museum of Wines and Spirits in Stockholm. He learned that Malört is a besk brännvin and that there are four of them currently being made in Sweden.

"Besk means bitter, and it was made from the wormwood that grew around homesteads and consumed as a medicinal alcohol," he said. "It was traditionally made with a potato base and Malört was originally used for stomach maladies—to cure indigestion, hangovers, nausea."

He said that he's also read how besk was "used as a cordial in southern Sweden, and you'd take it with a little bit of sugar. You'd take a bite of sugar and a sip or put a sugar cube in your mouth and drink."

I've never seen Malört served straight with sugar, but I have seen it served in quite a few different ways. Join us on a bar crawl, will you?

We met up at Bar Deville to start things off with a straight shot of Jeppson's Malört. The liqueur is a light straw color and you'll first get a wash of slightly bitter grapefruit flavors on your tongue. But what Jeppson's is known for is the aftertaste: a deeply bitter, lingering finish that feels like it'll never let up.

At Bar Deville, you can also try Bäska Snaps along side your Malört for comparison. Bäska Snaps is made by Bittermens, infused with wormwood, licorice, caraway, and citrus. We first noticed how different the color is—Bäska Snaps is quite amber—and that it smells strongly of licorice. Knowing that we had a big evening ahead, we sipped the liqueur, which was really sweet, thick and treacly. It was reminiscent of Fernet Branca in its viscosity, but some might compare it to cough medicine. None of us finished the Bäska Snaps, but Deville bartender Jason Turley said that he's considered using it in a Manhattan or Negroni. A visit to the Bäska Snaps website describes the spirit:

Throughout Scandinavia, it's tradition to take high proof aquavit and infuse it with bitter herbs to drink during the holidays and the long, cold winter that follows. These 'besk snaps' are served cold to family and visitors who need a bracing, bitter eye-opener...Determined to keep the tradition alive, Bittermens formulated a classic bitter schnapps by first creating an aquavit with flavors of caraway and infusing it with licorice, citrus and other herbs. It is then blended with a touch of sugar and combined with a wormwood distillate produced by one of the oldest distilleries in Pontarlier, France.

Onward to The Violet Hour, where we started by sampling R. Franklin's Original Recipe Malört, made by Letherbee Distillers, a local operation we visited recently. Bar manager Robby Haynes created the recipe and he lends the liqueur his name (his middle name is Franklin).

"I had wanted to make something of my own for a long time," he said. "Everyone does gin and there's a growing interest in bitters. I don't care for absinthe but I love bitters and I had a recipe that I'd been working on here."

Haynes was infusing a grain spirit with wormwood, elderflower, juniper, a touch of star anise, and other botanicals and was making it in gallon batches. He teamed up with Letherbee, whose gin he liked, to make it in larger batches, and has recently tweaked the product further and will release it to the public soon. It will come in pocket size 200-mL bottles, since you use so little Malört at a time that a whole bottle can take awhile to go through.

R. Franklin's Malört is bitter up front and the bitterness never ceases. One companion likened it to getting punched in the face. It has a scent of burnt orange and anise, and a murky green color that comes from the wormwood. Haynes said that his family came to visit Chicago and wanted to know what his liqueur tasted like, so he gave them a sample.

"My father said that he liked it, but the others said they didn't know if it went bad, or what was wrong with it," he said.

After we tasted it straight, Haynes made us three cocktails using R. Franklin's Malört: Odin's Holiday, made with 5 Banks Island Rum, lime, Marie Brizard Crème de Cacao, and Peychaud's; World Shattered, with Salers, lemon, honey syrup, raspberry, and mint; and the Thigh High, with Letherbee gin, lemon, honey, egg white, and super-bitter Amaro Sibilla.

The three cocktails highlighted the liqueur's versatility, pulling out citrus notes and cutting sweetness. My favorite was the fruity and minty World Shattered, which was light and easy drinking, two words I wouldn't typically use to describe Malört cocktails. Before we left, Haynes whipped us up an unnamed concoction with Malört, lavender-infused Dolin vermouth, lime, gin, and Peychaud's, which deserves a spot on the menu.

If you can handle one more stop on the Malört tour, make it at Trenchermen, where beverage director Tona Palomino has come up with some innovative ways to work with Jeppson's.

"I moved from New York to Chicago two years ago and when I arrived, a friend said I had to have it," Palomino recalls. "It's this beast of a spirit, so I thought, why not play with Malört?"

He started by serving us Jeppson's on tap, a fun serving method that doesn't alter the liqueur's flavor. But it was interesting to compare the original with Palomino's smoked Malört, which he makes by pouring Jeppson's Malört into a hotel pan and smoking it for 20 minutes with a combination of hickory, cherry, and apple woods. If you love smoky Scotches, you'll find that the process adds a welcome flavor to Malört. There's still some bitterness, but the smoke rounds off the harshness that Jeppson's has, making it into a pretty sippable spirit.

But our favorite Malört variation was the barrel-aged Malört, which is currently aging in a Hudson Baby Bourbon barrel. Palomino put the Malört in the barrel in November 2011, and planned to open it four months later, when Trenchermen was slated to open. The restaurant didn't open until last July, and Palomino decided to let the Malört age until it was a year old.

"We had no idea what would happen to the Malört when we barrel aged it, but it really mellowed things out considerably," he said. "Each time we tried it, it was sweeter and sweeter."

The Malört is still in the barrel, so you'll have to specifically ask for a sample. The barrel-aged Malört is a light tan color and has softened in a lovely way. It's round, sweet and caramelly with a short, bitter finish.

Palomino also uses Malört extensively in cocktails. The Desperate Vesper is the house Malört cocktail, and is made by stirring gin with Lillet Blanc and Malört. The Zombie is made with Gosling's rum, El Dorado White Rum, lime, grapefruit, honey, falernum, and Malört. The Heretic's Fate takes the smoked Malört and adds sour and absinthe. There's also a light cocktail that's no longer on the menu that Palomino said is "good for people just starting with Malört." It's a carbonated drink made with Malört, grapefruit, and a housemade tonic syrup; it tasted like a Paloma. Since Malört has strong grapefruit flavors, the fruit shows up frequently in cocktails that use Malört.