The Bitter Taste of Jeppson’s Malört Takes Root in Charlotte

“A burnt used condom.” “A grapefruit that’s been fermented in a diaper.” “Pencil shavings and regret.” “Licking a street.” “Licking an ashtray.” “Poison.”

These are just a few of the descriptors used by people who have taken a shot of Jeppson’s Malört, a liqueur with a flavor profile that sounds like a trawl through Satan’s pantry.

First distilled in Chicago during Prohibition, Malört is a midwestern version of beskbrännvin, a herbaceous Swedish schnapps that derives its bitter afterburn from wormwood, its sole flavoring agent. Since then — and despite its polarizing taste — Malört has made inroads into 30 U.S. states, including North Carolina.

Still somewhat of a rare find in Charlotte’s bars, you can buy a fifth of the acerbic spirit at ABC stores for $27.98. There are some local establishments that serve Malört, including Supperland, Super Abari Game Bar and Tommy’s Pub.

Pulliam first took a shot of Malört — it is by no means a sipping liquor — during a 2016 trip to Chicago, where it remains a popular rite of passage for tourists. At a local bar, he and his brother asked the bartender for suggestions. Nowadays, Pulliam calls the barkeep’s recommendation a kind of prank

“I was disgusted,” Pulliam says. “It was probably the most bitter thing I had ever tasted before.”

Super Abari Game Bar owner and founder Zach Pulliam reckons that he began stocking the stuff two years ago. At the time, he had to special order it through ABC, which did not have it on the shelves in Mecklenburg County.

“Now it’s a little bit more available,” Pulliam says. “I think maybe we’re the reason behind that.”

Roger Kongkham, who tends bar at Supperland and has been in the industry for 13 years, says he’s used to bitter flavors and astringent liqueurs like Fernet Branca. Still, Kongkham wasn’t prepared 15 years ago when he stepped into Chicago’s Scofflaw Lounge and asked for a drink recommendation.

“I was like, ‘Oh wow, there is absolutely nothing else on the market that tastes like this!’” Kongkham remembers. “Malört was like, unforgivingly itself.”

Rhea Buck, the bar manager at Tonidandel Brown’s Leluia Hall and previously at the restaurant group’s Supperland for four years, assessed the herbal liqueur’s “distinctive” flavor a bit more brutally than Pulliam and Kongkham.

“The first time I tasted it was at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans and I was horrified by the taste,” Buck says. “I describe Malört as like licking the pith of a grapefruit that has been tracked on someone’s shoe through the streets of sadness.”

A persistent taste of home

Chicago’s independent CH Distillery produces Malört, and the company has leaned into the disgust it fosters in imbibers. In 2023, CH launched an ad campaign that embraced the grimacing “Malört face,” highlighting photos of repulsed reactions made by first-time tasters.

In June 2025, they took it a step further, launching a humorously coarse social media campaign that asked customers to describe the spirit’s distinctive flavor, then proudly shared answers like “Nail polish enema,” “Moist dumpster residue” and “Donkey dick dipped in gasoline.”

Much of the marketing celebrates a hardy hometown spirit, as if Malört is something catastrophic that Chicagoans embrace and bond over — like the city’s brutal winter weather. Counterintuitively, that community-bonding approach may have led to the spirit’s spread beyond the shores of Lake Michigan.

Read More: Going Back to Somewhere New at Super Abari Game Bar

I was raised in Chicago, and during my bar hopping days Malört was still relatively obscure. That’s not the case with my younger relative Trey Teamer, a Windy City transplant to Colorado who relates to the camaraderie and rite of passage that the spirit engenders among acquaintances and friends.

“When you meet a tourist in Chicago, you introduce them to the city with a Chicago handshake. The handshake is a shot of Malört and an Old Style beer,” Teamer says, referencing a Milwaukee brew that is inexplicably popular in Chicago. “It’s supposed to be a friendly gag gift kind of thing, or a proper introduction into the grit of the people they’ll meet in the city.”

A wineseller and wine consultant, Laurel Grauer is a Chicago transplant to Charlotte. She remembers that she had never heard of Malört when a friend of a friend offered her a shot.

“He’s like, ‘It’s a challenge that you have to take a shot of this and I have to take a picture,’” Grauer remembers. Long after her Malört face was photographed, the liqueur persisted on Grauer’s palate.

“It’s like this bitterness that just scorches your tongue,” Grauer says. “In the wine world, we talk about a long finish. Malört’s finish is like eternity, because it just keeps giving.”

Similar to Teamer, she notes that tricking someone into tasting Malört is a bonding ritual.

“What’s beautiful about Malört is, once you’ve kind of gotten fooled by this, it’s almost like a bad taste pyramid scheme, like you have to get somebody else to try it,” she says.

Grauer compares Malört to the beer referenced by Teamer.

“It’s kind of like Old Style,” she says. “No one will say Old Style is good beer, but you feel a certain sense of home when you see an Old Style sign.”

The Windy City’s Malört lore

The word “Malört” is Swedish for wormwood, also a key ingredient in absinthe, which was rumored in the 19th century to have hallucinogenic properties. Unlike absinthe, Malört has never been considered a gateway to the creative madness of artists.

On the other hand, Malört is 35% alcohol, or 70 proof. Drink enough of the stuff and you’re likely to start seeing things like Vincent van Gogh.

In the middle ages, Swedish beskbrännvin was used as a medicine to treat stomach ailments and parasites. There’s no record of it coming to America, at least not commercially, until the 1920s, when a Swedish immigrant to Chicago named Carl Jeppson created the beverage.

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Jeppson sold Malört door to door in the city’s Andersonville neighborhood. To get around Prohibition, then in full swing, he marketed his product as a medicinal tonic and cure for stomach worms.

The CH Distillery website claims that Jeppson skirted problems with local law enforcement because police concluded that no one in their right mind would drink his bitter concoction recreationally.

“My favorite theory is that Jeppson couldn’t taste traditional alcohol due to his excessive cigar use,” Teamer says. “So he created something with such an extreme taste so he finally had something to drink.”

In 1933, Prohibition was repealed. Bielzoff Products purchased the recipe for Malört from Jeppson. George Brode, vice president of Bielzoff, bought out the company in 1945 and eventually changed its name to Carl Jeppson Company. He began distilling and bottling Malört at Chicago’s Mar-Salle Distillery.

When Mar-Salle closed in 1986, production of Malört moved first to Kentucky in 1987, then to Florida in 1989. Disconnected from its place of origin, it became a relatively obscure spirit.

In 2011, bartender and Malörtophile Sam Mechling began promoting the liqueur with humorous Twitter and Facebook posts. He started posting pictures of “Malört face,” a puckered expression of regret. Mechling had no connection to Carl Jeppson Co., but instead of suing him for his guerilla marketing, the company hired him.

Ironically, just as Malört’s popularity began to pick up in Chicago, it wasn’t even being made in the city. That changed in 2018, when CH Distillery — named as a reference to Chicago but also carbon and hydrogen, the fundamental compounds in alcohol — purchased Carl Jeppson Co.

A year later, the distiller resumed production of Malört in Chicago. Since then, the one-time medicinal elixir and niche product has become a Chicago rite of passage, the stuff of memes and an increasingly popular drink.

Malört gets some love in the Queen City

In recent years the bitter drink has taken root in the Queen City. At Super Abari, Pulliam says people regularly order shots of the stuff.

“It’s probably one of the top five shots that we get ordered,” he says.

Pulliam estimates that Malört drinkers at the game bar are split evenly between those unabashedly in love with the liqueur’s bitter bite and those who’ve been good-naturedly tricked by friends to take their first fateful shot.

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“I would say we run through probably a couple of bottles a week,” Pulliam notes. “If it’s a busier time, maybe three,” he says.

Pulliam, who was once appalled by Malört’s taste, has revised his assessment.

“It has that bitterness, that grapefruit flavor, and it’s a little bit floral,” he notes.

Pulliam says the people who come in to imbibe Malört are a mix of Chicago natives or transplants, service industry workers and people ready for a new taste adventure. He recalls that one employee started making a list of the comparisons that first time drinkers conjured to describe the liqueur.

“It’s ‘Somebody did a burnout in my mouth” or, you know, ‘It tastes like a burnt bandaid,’” Pulliam says.   

During Buck’s tenure at Supperland, she reckons the bar sold roughly a couple of shots of Malört a week.

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“Most often, we’d sell a group of shots purchased by one guest for their friends who have never had it,” she says. “I loved watching their reactions.”

Buck says the spirit is particularly popular with Charlotte bartenders, who have developed a love for its bitterness and citrus notes.

One of those bartenders is Kongkham. While Malört’s flavor didn’t win him over when he first tried it, he has since acquired a taste for it.

“Stockholm Syndrome kind of takes over,” Kongkham says, “You start to kind of salivate and crave those flavors.” Two and a half years ago, when Malört was beginning to make inroads into North Carolina, he lobbied Buck, then his boss at Supperland, to stock the stuff.

“Sometimes you just want something that’s kind of jarring and different and unique,” Kongkham says.

Kongkham made it a practice to give fellow bartenders their first shot of liqueur and then record their reactions. He has a folder on his phone titled “Malört Face.” He also says the Malört can lead to memorable experiences.

“I was with my fiance at Super Abari Game Bar and it was the night that I proposed to her and we got engaged,” Kongkham remembers.

As part of their celebration, the couple passed shots of Malört to patrons around the bar, turning it into a communal event.

“Most iconic nights, we were probably drinking Malört,” he recalls. “It ties in the core memories for me.”

A cocktail contest and parting shots

Buck is one service industry veteran who has not been seduced by the liqueur’s assault on the palate. So she was surprised when an organizer asked her to sit in as judge for the Jeppson’s Malört cocktail competition that took place at Dram & Draught in South End February 2024.

“I did warn them that I don’t love the taste of Malört, but it actually taught me a lot about how the spirit can best be used,” Buck says. She recommends that Malört cocktail makers avoid using anything rich or creamy with the liquor, since it cements Malört’s persistent flavor in your mouth.

“If you’re going to use Malört, don’t hide the flavor,” she says. “Lean into it.”

The winners of the competition did just that.

Kongkham took home first place with a cocktail he calls “My Alternate Life Outside Reality’s Terms,” an acronym for Malört. The main ingredients of the drink were Malört, Planteray Pineapple Rum, lime, tamarind, Italicus (an Italian bergamot liqueur) and Aperol (a bittersweet and herbal Italian aperitif).

Super Abari bartender Mike Rice came in second with a cocktail that countered Kongkham’s complexity with simplicity. Rice combined Malört with Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. Buck says Rice and Kongkham both worked well with the spirit and made delightful drinks.

Rice’s concoction is just one of several Malört cocktails that Super Abari has served over the years, like Malört-aritas and Malört Paper Planes, variations of popular drinks that replace tequila or bourbon with the bitter elixir from Chicago.

With Malört making slow but steady inroads in the Queen City, Charlotte’s mixologists, bartenders and business owners are only too happy to offer advice to curious drinkers.

“I would say go for it. If you kind of fight through that pain a little bit, there’s a very enjoyable spirit there,” Pulliam says, incidentally coining a wonderful metaphor for life.

Read More: Leluia Hall Proves Tonidandel-Brown’s Penchant for Preservation

“I always strongly encourage people to step out of their comfort zone and try things they haven’t tried before,” Kongkham says.

Buck offers a slightly divergent view. If someone wants to try Jeppson’s Malört for the first time, her advice to them is, “Order something to drink immediately afterwards.”

“At the wine store I’m like, ‘This tastes terrible. You got to try it.’” Grauer says. “It’s just a unique fun and bonding experience that brings people together, even through pain.”

Despite caveats and colorful descriptors, unquenchable curiosity about Malört remains — and is likely to grow. Is its taste a chance to broaden the palette, a hurdle to overcome before finding pleasure in a bitter ambrosia of the gods? Or is it like some noxious liquid that bubbles up from the ground in an H.P. Lovecraft story?

The final decision rests with you, dear drinker. You’ve nothing to lose from taking a shot — except your tastebuds.