Against all bartending norms and propriety and common decency, Western Massachusetts bartender Jared Belden recently posed himself a cursed challenge: to take Malört and make it worse.
Consider it Belden’s reprieve from the demands of craft cocktail perfection. “It’s always a struggle to make the perfect cocktail, the perfect anything. But what if you took something bad and made it worse?”
Enter Evil Malört.
A shot of Malört already functions as a kind of beloved (and memefied) obscenity in the bar scene’s lingua franca, straddling the line between a bonding ritual and one of hazing. Evil Malört doubles down on that reputation, even though, as Belden notes, “nobody asked for this.”
Belden began making the spirit in his apartment, taste-testing with friends, before unleashing it on the innocent citizens of Northampton, Massachusetts. Like the original Malört, which forms the base of Belden’s concoction, Evil Malört is a challenging spirit. One of the first bartenders he poured a shot for “literally jumped back, and was like, ‘What is that?’ and after it settled in his mouth for a bit, he was like, ‘Why is it stinging?’” Belden guessed that “it was the Carolina Reapers and the cigarettes.”
Still, its victims can’t get enough. “Twenty minutes later, he came back and was like, ‘Can I get another one of those?’”
“After it settled in his mouth for a bit, he was like, ‘Why is it stinging?’ [He] guessed that ‘it was the Carolina Reapers and the cigarettes.’ ”
The recipe calls for a fat wash with truffle and sesame oil, the aforementioned peppers (including seeds) and tobacco infusion (Newports) and enough cuttlefish ink to add a briny, low-tide salinity that, ominously, renders the spirit a silky, opaque black.
But the recipe isn’t disgusting for the sake of being disgusting. Belden tried “to retain some of the qualities of Malört,” he says. “I picked flavors that work with and against the bitter herbaceousness of Malört.”
It took 15 iterations, each with varying salinity and fat-wash ratios (as well as a careful reading of an article from the National Institutes of Health on the solubility and toxicity of nicotine) before Belden debuted his Frankenstein’s monster.
“The ultimate goal was to make this a drinkable liquid. I could, you know, rot it, put it in an old shoe, do the grossest stuff to it, but that would render it undrinkable,” he says. “I guess this is the only pressure point to making something as bad as possible—you have to make people still want to drink it.”
Somehow, people do.
Since its introduction several months ago, Evil Malört has been terrorizing and hypnotizing the bar scene of Western Massachusetts. According to Belden, who works at Northampton’s Tellus & the Satellite Bar, “People see it on the backbar, [and] they’re like, ‘What is that? What is that gonna do to me?’”
Nobody has responded with as much perverse curiosity as fellow bartenders.
The manager of Northampton’s Green Room, Anthony Brocatto, traces notes of limestone, soil and acid reflux in the spirit, or, as they put it: “Grandma’s furniture (when she still smoked).”
Claire Barclay, former district sales manager of CH Distillery and Jeppson’s Malört, is a longtime fan of the funky vegetal notes of the spirit. After a recent tasting, she zeroed in on the overwhelmingly fatty palate and briny spice of Belden’s creation, describing the experience as akin to “drowning in the Atlantic after taking a shot of Malört while chewing on a jalapeño.” A friend of Belden’s, meanwhile, has described it as “grassy soy sauce, with a sting to it.”
For Belden, the response is vindicating. Facing a rut of ennui after managing bars and cocktail programs for most of his career, he wanted to reignite his passion with experimental, high-concept recipes. Evil Malört offered an odd opportunity.
“I was pushing the boundaries of what people will put in their mouth, and I was pushing the boundaries of what will make my friends say, ‘I’m not your friend anymore,’” he recalls.
To those brave and curious enough to sample Evil Malört, Belden offers a simple, but effective, reassurance: “It’s not going to kill you. It’s specifically designed not to do that.”