early stages of popularity. You’d go into your local bar and a bevy of so-called “Jägerettes” in hot pants and tank tops would be pouring this weird brown liqueur with a fierce herbal-cinnamon-licorice kick. It came in rectangular green bottles bearing an almost biblical image of a cross shining over an elk’s horns. It was like nothing else we had ever been served. If you happened to be a student at the University of Vermont in the early 1990s, as I was, you too may have sucked down many a Jägermeister—generally the last drink of the night in a certain basement bar in downtown Burlington—before stumbling upstairs and into the snowy night en route to Nectar’s for fries and gravy, which you had to eat steaming hot on the walk home before the gravy congealed in the subzero night air.
Anyway, rumors quickly spread about the obscure German booze with secret ingredients. Some said it contained elk’s blood. Others said that what we were getting in America was a watered-down version of the original. Or that the real stuff—available only in Germany—contained special herbs (maybe opiates?) that gave it an even more special kick.
When my friend S. and I were backpacking in Europe one summer—in our Phish T-shirts and Birkenstocks—the first thing we did upon crossing the border into Germany was to buy a bottle of Jägermeister. We sat on a bunk in the hostel, took sips from the bottle, and looked at each other. “Do you think it’s different?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I think so. I think I feel different.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I feel different, too.”
We also believed the rumors that the gold flakes in another popular liqueur, the cinnamon Goldschläger, would make microscopic cuts in your throat and stomach when you drank it, thus allowing the alcohol to directly enter the bloodstream for maximum intoxication. What’s more, S. and I believed we could travel through four countries as enlightened hippie-platonic travel companions, sharing a bed, and there would be no drama. Ah, the naïveté of youth!
Until I started writing about spirits for a living, I always wanted to believe the corporate storytelling that accompanies so much booze in the marketplace. The genre is well established: miraculous tales of rustic peasants gathering some obscure ingredient, a secret recipe from the Middle Ages zealously guarded by monks who have taken a vow of silence, the stern family patriarch carefully sampling every barrel before bottling. Who doesn’t want to believe these stories? There is, as we all know, so little magic left in the world.
“Quintessential liquor industry puffery!” That’s what Rob Cooper called it, in his booming voice. We were talking on the phone, only about two months into my job at the Post . “I guess you could say it’s romantic and that it allows the consumer to dream. Or whatever. But it’s just a lie. They need to have a compelling story of some sort. A lot of companies probably feel that pressure.” Cooper added, “I’m over the whole puffery thing.”
Now, this was a somewhat contradictory statement. If you remember, Cooper is the man who promised a room full of people at Tales of the Cocktail that he would bring Crème Yvette—nostalgic, lavender-hued, part of the “holy trinity of lost spirits”—back to market. During this particular phone conversation, Cooper and I were discussing another new liqueur he was launching: a spirit called St-Germain that is allegedly made of elderflowers from the Alps. St-Germain’s compelling, romantic story sounded like a doozy. A classic of the genre.
According to the lavish marketing material when it launched, St-Germain uses only fresh, wild elderflowers picked high in the French Alps. Immediately after harvest, the flowers undergo a “highly secret” maceration process that extracts flavor “without bruising the flowers.” It is “a carefully orchestrated sequence of events, which must be
Anyway, rumors quickly spread about the obscure German booze with secret ingredients. Some said it contained elk’s blood. Others said that what we were getting in America was a watered-down version of the original. Or that the real stuff—available only in Germany—contained special herbs (maybe opiates?) that gave it an even more special kick.
When my friend S. and I were backpacking in Europe one summer—in our Phish T-shirts and Birkenstocks—the first thing we did upon crossing the border into Germany was to buy a bottle of Jägermeister. We sat on a bunk in the hostel, took sips from the bottle, and looked at each other. “Do you think it’s different?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I think so. I think I feel different.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I feel different, too.”
We also believed the rumors that the gold flakes in another popular liqueur, the cinnamon Goldschläger, would make microscopic cuts in your throat and stomach when you drank it, thus allowing the alcohol to directly enter the bloodstream for maximum intoxication. What’s more, S. and I believed we could travel through four countries as enlightened hippie-platonic travel companions, sharing a bed, and there would be no drama. Ah, the naïveté of youth!
Until I started writing about spirits for a living, I always wanted to believe the corporate storytelling that accompanies so much booze in the marketplace. The genre is well established: miraculous tales of rustic peasants gathering some obscure ingredient, a secret recipe from the Middle Ages zealously guarded by monks who have taken a vow of silence, the stern family patriarch carefully sampling every barrel before bottling. Who doesn’t want to believe these stories? There is, as we all know, so little magic left in the world.
“Quintessential liquor industry puffery!” That’s what Rob Cooper called it, in his booming voice. We were talking on the phone, only about two months into my job at the Post . “I guess you could say it’s romantic and that it allows the consumer to dream. Or whatever. But it’s just a lie. They need to have a compelling story of some sort. A lot of companies probably feel that pressure.” Cooper added, “I’m over the whole puffery thing.”
Now, this was a somewhat contradictory statement. If you remember, Cooper is the man who promised a room full of people at Tales of the Cocktail that he would bring Crème Yvette—nostalgic, lavender-hued, part of the “holy trinity of lost spirits”—back to market. During this particular phone conversation, Cooper and I were discussing another new liqueur he was launching: a spirit called St-Germain that is allegedly made of elderflowers from the Alps. St-Germain’s compelling, romantic story sounded like a doozy. A classic of the genre.
According to the lavish marketing material when it launched, St-Germain uses only fresh, wild elderflowers picked high in the French Alps. Immediately after harvest, the flowers undergo a “highly secret” maceration process that extracts flavor “without bruising the flowers.” It is “a carefully orchestrated sequence of events, which must be
Similar Books
