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MEAL TICKET CHALLENGE! Bartenders: Make us a palatable Jeppson's Malört cocktail
The Web site for the award-winning alternative weekly, the Philadelphia City Paper.
MEAL TICKET CHALLENGE! Bartenders: Make us a palatable Jeppson's Malört cocktail
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| Photo | Big Rye on Flickr |
Don't ask us how we procured it, but Meal Ticket recently got its hands on an unopened bottle of Jeppson's Malört. If you're not familiar with Malört, here is the deal: It's a Scandinavian style of schnapps derived from wormwood. It's available only in Chicago and its surrounding area. And it is really gross. Characterized in an April 2009 Chicago Reader article as "a tool of cruel pranksters or a test of one's appetite for punishment," Malört, to us at least, tastes like some combination of rotten grapefruit, fermented earwax and a jab to the solarplexis. It is so bitter that it makes bitters taste like rock candy.
The go-to spirit for Chitown natives who enjoy screwing with friends visiting from out of town, Malört is so notoriously not fun to drink that there's an entire Flickr group dedicated to compiling photos of the terrible faces people make after tipping back a shot. (personal faves: 1 2 3)
It is for all these reasons that Meal Ticket would like to issue a challenge to Philadelphia's bartenders: Make us a Malört-based cocktail that tastes good that doesn't make us want to die! We don't have a prize to speak of at the moment, but you will surely earn the people's ovation and fame forever. And we'll buy you a bunch of non-Malört drinks maybe?
That same Chicago Reader article cited above is about this very subject. In the Chi, bartenders dropped everything from Drambuie and Amaro Montenegro to triple sec and Tabasco into their Malört cocktails. So, Philly drink slingers: Do you have a Malort drink in your repertoire? Or do you have a good idea for one? E-mail drew.lazor[at]citypaper.net and we'll bring the pain to you personally.
Fermented earwax. It tastes like fermented earwax.
Not gonna ask how you know what fermented earwax tastes like. But I'm totally down to be one of the taste-testers. I like bitter drinks...
[...] St.) to visit barkeeps Christian Gaal, Colin Shearn and Al Sotack, all of whom took us up on the Jeppson’s Malört Challenge we wrote about last week. (We’ll be posting about the surprisingly palatable results throughout this week.) Non-Malört [...]
[...] week, we challenged Philly’s best bartenders to come up with a tasty cocktail using Jeppson's Malört, a notoriously disgusting Chicago-based spirit. The first person to take us up on the challenge was [...]
[...] The subterranean spirit stirrers at The Franklin (112 S. 18th St.) seemed to be equal parts intrigued and concerned by the introduction of Malört to their bar, easily one of the best-stocked in the city. “So you got some gross shit for me?” Shearn, a self-proclaimed bitter-stuff enthusiast, asked when we surfaced with the goods. Yes we did. (Just to recap, Malört is an only-available-in-Chicago spirit that is well-reputed for its crass undrinkability.) [...]
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