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 of liquid revulsion, presumably in the expectation that we’d become “Malört-faced” in return.
I hope my stone-faced reaction didn’t disappoint him. While it is true that I hadn’t tasted Malört previously, it turns out I was accidentally equipped to contextualize it immediately.
To be sure, the liquid was a resolutely and uncompromising powerhouse of funky herbal bitterness, a punch in the palate often famously leaving first-timers gasping for air, epithets and a handy slop bucket.
My unchanged demeanor probably owed to two factors. For one, earlier in life I never made the mistake of concluding that when it came to taking shots, that they’re supposed to taste “good,” or if they did, as with peach schnapps and various other manifestations of Disneyfied alco-fluff, that they mattered at all in the larger scheme of things.
And, I’ve always tried to remain open to a panoply of flavors and textures. In fact, my only thought upon tasting Malört for the first time was a profound sense of déjà vu.
That’s because I was reminded of another place and a different time, 35 years earlier, when my new friends in Copenhagen imitated the Windy City bartender’s proselytizing largesse by offering me their own regional specialty called Gammel Dansk Bitter Dram.
It may have been a slightly more rounded concoction (to decide, we’d be compelled to flip a Kroner coin), though overall not at all dissimilar to Malört, alerting us to a tradition of “bitters” sure to elude a great many Americans wholly unaware of options such as these, deferring instead to Keystone Light.
As such, Gammel Dansk actually offers a clue to Malört’s lineage, which can be traced to nearby Sweden. When you’re in Copenhagen, the nations of Denmark and Sweden are only a short distance apart across the Øresund (Öresund) strait; since the advent of the Øresund (Öresund) Bridge (and tunnel) two decades ago, the commute is very quick.
Fittingly, then, the saga of Malört begins in Lund, Sweden with a man named Carl Jeppson, who immigrated to Chicago early in the 20th century, joining fellow resettled Swedes in the city’s Andersonville neighborhood. Jeppson carried with him knowledge of a drink called bäsk.
Bäsk is a Swedish-style liqueur (the base vodka-like spirit is brännvin, or “burn-wine”) flavored with wormwood (called “malört” in Swedish), or sometimes anise; Sweden actually did not ban wormwood-flavored alcoholic beverages. Bäsk is an old alternative spelling of the word besk, which means “bitter”.
As with Gammel Dansk, the object of bäsk is to infuse a neutral spirit with herbs or spices to achieve bitterness, as applicable to use as an aperitif or digestif.
(If our current “craft” era’s youthful hipster denizens of the Cult of Underberg might glance beyond the ritual of the tiny paper-coated bottle and pitchers filled with tiny green caps, they’d easily see a connection between the German, Swedish and Chicago interpretations of intentionally bitter liquor, even if the latter require decanting into a glass.)
Once in Chicago, Carl Jeppson created his own version of Bäsk, calling it Malört and registering the spirit as medicinal, enabling him to circumvent Prohibition and sell it door to door. It is said that federal agents suspicious of Jeppson’s liquid tasted Malört, quickly agreeing that anything as foul surely had to be medicine because no one in his right mind would drink it for pleasure.
In 1934 Jeppson was through with buzz (that’s a Steely Dan reference, by the way), and providentially he managed to find George Brode, a seemingly straight arrow of a Chicago lawyer who secretly harbored literary and artistic proclivities.
Brode was navigating the Depression by working for D.J. Bielzoff Products Co., his wife’s family firm, which had a winning post-Prohibition strategy of purchasing the recipes for distinctive Old Country liquors and liqueurs, and marketing them to Chicago’s immigrant communities.
Jeppson’s Malört fit the Bielzoff plan perfectly, and earned its small market niches, but after World War II it came time for Brode to earn real money (he subsequently became a successful probate attorney), so the liquor business was parceled off, except for Malört, which became Brode’s own adopted wayward orphan — a side hustle, a hobby and an evangelical mission that lasted for the remainder of his life.
It wasn’t about the money, of which there was little. Brode likely found in Malört the manifestation of a little guy’s longshot contrarian attitude, and a vehicle for sheer joy in taunting the more polite classes with reminders that they simply weren’t man enough to handle his product; however, genuine working men (a few of them anyway) often grasped the value of a shot (either long or short) of a bitter jolt with beer, which eventually became the present-day Chicago Handshake of Malört and Old Style.
Fortunately for Malört’s survival and future revival, in the mid-1960s Brode hired Patricia Gabelick as his secretary and sole employee of his law office.
Brode was 30 years her senior, and although he never divorced, and they never married, it was the dawning of a veritable Hallmark love story for the ages, assuming it is possible to even imagine Malört reposing beneath the mistletoe in one of those soapy Yuletide sagas.
Gabelick did not comprehend Malört’s allure, but she was drawn into Brode’s obsession during the course of their long relationship. He ignored his own children and left the spirit to her in his will, and after his death in 1999, she singlehandedly kept the brand afloat, just barely, as much an homage to Brode’s memory as any semblance of a genuine investment or career opportunity.
Malört had a steadily dwindling fan base of older devotees, and it seemed to be only a matter of time until the brand disappeared completely. But this juncture is where the Jeppson’s Malört story really begins. Out of love, stubbornness and force of habit, and with a wee bit of luck, first Brode and then Gabelick managed to bring a declining and seemingly outmoded product to the point of a miraculous revival.
During the first decade of the 2000s, fueled by the advent of internet and social media-driven communications that amplified Malört’s dual essences (boundless disgust and pure uniqueness) in ways that print newspaper ads never could have approached, a new generation of youthful enthusiasts merged with newer-age Chicago bar and restaurant people (and a handful of the older holdovers) to bring Malört’s considerable mythology squarely into the zeitgeist of Bourdain and the Food Network.
In the beginning Gabelick cautiously accepted the overtures of a succession of youthful fans who wanted to help her, and soon she was placed in a similar position as Ludwig von Beethoven when the latter’s 9th Symphony debuted; he was profoundly deaf and wasn’t aware that the audience was cheering until someone turned him around to see them.
Gabelick’s helpers showed her these new Malört fans, and suddenly she understood that now, at long last, people were applauding this strange, lingering concoction. I can only imagine how emotional this must have been for her.
I submit to my readers that in point of fact, the cast of characters — Jeppson, Brode, Gabelick and the young Malört team that gathered around her during the dawning of a new millennium — comprise one of the greatest American underdog stories of them all.
Malört had as many lives as a feral alley cat, and used up most of them, but unexpectedly lived long enough to become a bona fide Chicago icon.
Not unexpectedly, Malört’s uniquely challenging flavor didn’t make me cry. Noel’s book did. The very last thing I foresaw happening while reading it was the necessity of pausing several times to wipe my eyes; my wife feared encroaching senility, and after each breakdown I’d pause to ask myself: “What on earth is the matter with me?”
The answer is nothing. Nothing at all is the matter with me, apart from experiencing a writer, Josh Noel, on top of his game. Malört turns out to possess nuances aplenty, and none of them escapes the writer.
To paraphrase the single best description ever offered for why the musical brothers Gallagher of the rock band Oasis hate each other (“Noel has lots of buttons, and Liam has lots of fingers”), it transpires that Josh Noel has lots of fingers, and I’m the one with all the buttons, because as one might already have guessed, his story of Malört isn’t really about booze at all.
In fact, alcohol is the least of it. Noel’s book is not a treatise on distillation, Swedish-American cultural history or tattoos, although all three are examined.
Rather, it is a tale about love, faith and perseverance, about determined underdogs and a few social outcasts holding on to their dreams long enough to catch a headwind and finally win a damn match.
Whatever is left of the American Dream, the “Malört Century” aptly represents it, with a relatively small number of people from vastly disparate backgrounds finding common ground over a period of decades with the beverage itself, but more importantly, with each other.
That’s enough to make a hardcore cynic like me turn to the hankies, every single time.
So, should you run out and buy a bottle of Jeppson’s Malört Liqueur for the home bar? Maybe, maybe not. Then as now, Malört isn’t for everyone, but it can be purchased in Louisville.
At the same time, I’ve no hesitation in recommending Noel’s book, which can be acquired at bookshop.org, as well as other familiar outlets. If you’re like me, and prefer rooting for the underdogs rather than the overlords, you’ll find it a fascinating and instructive read.
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“Edibles & Potables” is Food & Dining Magazine’s Sunday slot for news and views that range beyond our customary metropolitan Louisville coverage area, as intended to be food (and drink) for thought.
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