Malört

One night during the summer of 2002, perched on the top of a ridge in North Dakota's Roosevelt National Park, I experienced one of the worst food tastes ever. That I distinguish "food tastes" from general tastes is important. Some things are meant to be eaten. Others aren't.

The sandy ridge was covered in scrubby brush and prickly pear cacti. East of the ridge, beyond a series of shallow canyons and further layers of ridges, lay a vast, flat, tall-grass plateau. A plateau which, the next morning, was being traversed by springing pronghorn antelope, as my buddy Wyatt, with whom I was hiking, and I would see when we opened the door of our tent to the early morning sun. The view was stunning.

The night before, after a few hours of hiking in from the road, passing a massive resting bison along the way, Wyatt and I scrambled to the top of the ridge to set up camp for the evening. It offered spectacular views, was not in the way of oncoming bison herds – we hoped - and was airy and breezy. After pitching our tent and firing up the stove to cook a quick hot meal of something or other, most likely involving beans, we cracked open a paper carton of orange juice and a plastic bottle of gin that we had brought with us. The idea felt decadent: a gin and juice in the middle of wild bison country.

Decadent it surely was, just as sure as it was disgusting.

Before leaving my parents' home in Minnesota's town of cows, colleges and contentment, Northfield, we made a trip to the liquor store and in pretty predicable fashion purchased off the bottom shelf. We justified the practicality of the plastic bottle and most surely delighted in the deal we were getting. What a mistake we had made.

The gin, whose brand name shall remain nameless - not out of some sense of propriety, but because that piece of information has been forever lost in history's great dustbin - tasted absolutely industrial. It tasted like something not meant to be eaten. It had a finish like a rasp to the throat. Its note of DEET-laced bug spray completely trounced - beat into the ground - any other flavor that might have been present. More orange juice just didn't help either. The abrasive, brutal flavor just lingered, seemingly forever.

A few years later, in Chicago, I tasted Malört for the first time. Malört, a strange bitter aperitif available in the Windy City (though made in Florida), carries a flavor that many would describe as the worst food taste ever, even trumping that unfortunate plastic bottled gin. In fact, Malört was a step up from the gin. Or a step down, rather. Malört advertises accurately: it is, as the label says, "rugged and unrelenting (even brutal) to the palate." Its taste is indeed "brusque." Like many bitters, Malört relies on mountain herbs, specifically an unnamed "unusual species of herb which grows wild on northern European mountainsides." Whatever this herb is, it has a truly odd and difficult flavor.

Malört, in its own way, leaves much else in the dust, especially that novice of an "unrelenting" spirit, that well traveled, aforementioned gin. Were Malört merely a spirit and nothing more, it would be an oddity and a difficulty, but it wouldn't be poetry. Which it, in fact, is. To our great benefit, the Malört experience is made up of two parts: the literary component and the gastronomic component. With a bottle comes a booklet-length label replete with lore, statistics, warnings, challenges and witticisms. A well done reading sets the stage and primes the pump. To some, it instills fear: nervous, unsure, leg-twitching fear. To others, eager curiosity. And yet others are merely nonplussed, confused, left scratching their heads.

Malört awakens the senses and forces one to confront the palate. (Just the other day, Wyatt informed me, in an email, that he recently woke up to something jabbing into his back. He had rolled over onto a bottle of Malört, which was therefore quite literally and beautifully awakening him to his senses.) True, its method of shaking the sensory world from its slumber is not for everyone: it's the equivalent of getting yanked out of bed and slamming to the floor; the equivalent of awakening to the gaping open end of a bowl of ice cold water pouring down onto your face. Like all trascendental experiences, Malört tells that what we once believed to be true just may not be so, that we live in a world of illusions and of misconceptions. That taste has, in fact, very stretchable boundaries.

San Franciscans have their Fernet. The Piedmontese have their Campari. And the Chicagoans, god bless them, have their Malört.