He had been warned.
At a recent house concert in Printers Row, Pat Byrne, a soulful Irish troubadour based in Texas, bravely took a swig of the yellow liquid, scrunched up his face, and blurted out, “This is horrible.” And then laughed. We all laughed.
He had just had his first taste of Malört.
Malört is the Swedish word for wormwood. What absinthe is to Paris, Malört is to Chicago.
Despite its notorious reputation, Malört is having a moment. It seems to be everywhere: in bars, of course, but also innocently sitting on the tops of people’s liquor cabinets. Even Gov. JB Pritzker took a swig in August during the Democratic National Convention.
There are various ways of drinking Malört. Straight. But there is also that thing called the Chicago Handshake, which typically consists of Old Style, or Hamm’s, and a shot of Malört. Kasey’s Tavern in Printers Row offers another variation on the theme: hard seltzer and Malört (“the Chiclawgo Handshake”). Nowadays, there are numerous flavors of Malört: candy cane pepper Malört, pumpkin spice Malört. During the Halloween season a Buffy the Vampire Slayer pop-up will be offering candy corn Malört.
Now Josh Noel, the Chicago Tribune’s former beer writer, has published Malört: The Redemption of a Revered & Reviled Spirit, a popular history told in a conversational style by someone who actually likes the drink. For the last few weeks, he has been making the promotional rounds of bookstores, bars, and breweries: Revolution Brewing in Logan Square, Ward Eight cocktail lounge in Evanston, the Violet Hour in Wicker Park, Sketchbook Brewing in Skokie, and the Green Mill in Uptown.
I saw him at Exile in Bookville in the Fine Arts Building, where I also had my first sip of the yellow liquid. But I cheated. The writer Keir Graff, playing the role of the charming and gracious bartender, served me a combination of Malört, elderberry, and Beefeater gin. It was a potent mix for sure but surprisingly refreshing: may be it was because Graff served me, at my request, a thimble-size portion of it. A nice mix of people came out to hear Noel talk about and read from the book and then answer a few questions. I looked around to see who my fellow Malört curious were in the crowd. Was that Gillian Flynn, of Gone Girl fame, I wondered to myself? (Yes, indeed, it was).
“Malört is Malört,” said Noel. “It’s Chicago history in a bottle. People just love it on a visceral level. It’s not just something you drink. It’s an experience.”
Noel, who wrote about Goose Island in his first book, Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out: Goose Island, Anheuser-Busch, and How Craft Beer Became Big Business, didn’t quite know what his next project was going to be until Christmas 2021, when he took a shot of Malört to settle his stomach. At that point, he experienced a lightning bolt moment. “Huh,” he said, as he swallowed the drink, “there might be a book here.”
There sure was.
He knew people were interested in it, even fascinated by it but “what is the real Malört story?” he wondered.
His Malört is a love story of sorts. It’s about the love of a particular liqueur but also the love story between the two people, George Brode and Pat Gabelick, for whom the drink became their reason for being.
As part of his initial research, Noel got hold of Gabelick’s number and called her up out of the blue. “We talked for an hour and then we talked for the next two and a half years. It’s really about the people and the relationships that made the thing the thing.”
Although he received a law degree from Northwestern, George Brode worked as an executive at the family business, D. J. Bielzoff Products, a liquor manufacturer, at 1109 S. State Street. The company sold spirits, cocktails, bitters, and flavored gin. In 1934, a 70-year-old Swedish immigrant by the name of Carl Jeppson asked Brode if the company would consider adding to its roster a yellow-green liqueur that he had been peddling to his fellow Swedes on the North Side.
Public drinking in Chicago would never be the same.
In 1943, Brode became vice president of Bielzoff. Two years later he bought the company. But there was a hiccup along the way. He served a short stint in prison for draft evasion before being pardoned by President Harry Truman. After his release, he changed the name of the company from Bielzoff Products to Red Horse Liquors before eventually selling it in 1953. At that point, he opened his own law firm at 201 N. Wells Street. But he still had an abiding interest in the peculiar yellow liqueur. He took Malört along with him from the Red Horse catalog and named it in honor of the old Swede who had sold it to him: Jeppson’s Malört Liqueur.
Now all he had to do was sell it.
With future sales in mind, Brode decided to open his own ad agency. His one and only client would be Malört. Ostensibly, Brode was still a lawyer and selling Malört was a side project but in reality it consumed his life.
Brode marketed the drink as a fine liqueur for discriminating tastes. He knew it wasn’t for everyone. In fact, it appealed to very few people but just enough to make it worth his while so he began placing ads that dared customers, especially men, to “quitchyerbellachin’” and try it. Another ad asked, “Are you man enough to drink Jeppson?” Still, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, Brode sold about 3,500 or so cases each year, according to Noel.
In 1966, Pat Gabelick, a working-class girl from Cicero, began working as a legal secretary for Brode at his Wells Street office. Malört would also change her life. Although she never married Brode, they were a couple for decades. In his will, Brode made sure that Gabelick would take over the quixotic task of selling the alcoholic oddity. When he died in 1999, that’s just what she did.
But finding and maintaining a clientele was, as always, a challenge. The children and grandchildren of the Swedish immigrants had little to no interest in drinking the bitter concoction from the Old Country. Instead, the drink began to appeal to new waves of immigrants, including scores of post-World War II-era Poles. Then, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Central Americans took to the drink and adopted Malört as their own.
During the barren years when virtually no one wanted to stock Jeppsons in their bars there were a few outliers. Dave Jemilo, long-time owner of the Green Mill in Uptown, was one of them. He didn’t particularly like the taste, he told Noel, but “it grows on you.” There were others along the way: Delilah’s, Nisei Lounge, Simon’s Tavern.
For years Malört was only sold locally. To use a beer analogy, it was the Spotted Cow of Chicago. Either way, it caught the eye of Chicago journalists in search of a good story with a solid local angle. In 2007, Mark Brown of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about the mysterious liquid in his column. He liked that Gabelick was keeping it afloat: by herself. She employed no sales staff, did no advertising, and yet somehow managed to keep it going.
But then something changed in the zeitgest. Attitudes towards Malört changed, Noel observes. By 2008, people actually started paying attention to it. It enjoyed a cultural resurgence by appealing to a new generation of drinkers. “The new generation didn’t simply want brands,” observed Noel. “It wanted experiences.” Malört checked all the boxes: craft drinks were in, corporate brands were out. What’s more, Malört had history, and it was authentic. The cool kids sold it, bought it, drank it. It was the Bukowski of liqueurs. Scofflaw in Logan Square even had Malört on draft. “On draft!” laughs Noel. It appeared in the movie, Drinking Buddies. Even Anthony Bourdain gave his seal of approval. “Malört never changed to please the masses,” writes Noel. “The masses changed to understand Malört.”
In other words, Malört had arrived.
In 2018, Tremaine Atkinson, owner of CH Distillery, bought Malört from Gabelick for a cool $2.2 million. Malört survived the pandemic when CH introduced Malört Hand Sanitizer, given free to first responders and health care workers. And after years of being manufactured elsewhere—briefly in Kentucky and then in Florida––Malört was once again being made in Chicago.
Meanwhile, Pat Gabelick is not getting any younger. She is 81 years old. “She’s not doing great,” says Noel. “I’m a little sad about that actually.”
Still, Noel’s Malört reads like a fable, a Chicago fairy tale with a happy ending. It doesn’t star a prince or a princess but rather an executive and his secretary who turned an undrinkable drink into a local icon.
Or as Noel says, “Malört is part of the fabric of Chicago.”
Malört: The Redemption of a Revered & Reviled Spirit is available at bookstores and through the Chicago Review Press website.
Support arts and culture journalism today. This work doesn't happen without your support. Contribute today and ensure we can continue to share the latest reviews, essays, and previews of the most anticipated arts and culture events across the city.