"Malört And Savior": This "Gross" Liqueur Is Trending Because Of The New Pope (And It's Not For The Reason You'd Expect)

Don’t worry about the urban myth regarding absinthe ; there is nowhere near enough potency in either it or malört to make you hallucinate. What you do have to worry about, however, is malört’s horrifically bitter taste that will make your tongue try to detach and escape from your mouth. We all have Sweden to thank for this concoction.

The Swedes have a traditional wormwood-flavored liqueur called bäsk, which literally means "bitter." It makes sense they’d come up with this; they need something to keep themselves from freezing to death up there. You also need the strength of a Viking to swig it down.

Here comes another coincidence: Pope Bob is very familiar with long droughts because he was born in Chicago. But his streak-ending election is far more impressive than the Chicago Cubs' curse that lasted only a paltry 71 years. It takes a special kind of Midwestern grit to beat back literal millennia of strike-outs for American cardinals.

Jeppson’s Malört is uniquely Chicagoan. Swedish immigrant Carl Jeppson started brewing and selling the stuff during Prohibition and marketing it as "medicine." Think of him as a Viking Al Capone.

He eventually sold his magic elixir to attorney George Brode, who said, “This stuff tastes awful. We must begin production immediately!” For a long time, Malört remained a local phenomenon. It became a symbol of the city’s toughness and was often worn as a badge of honor amongst young drinkers daring each other to take down a shot .

It never really gained the kind of traction needed to go national until 2019, when CH Distillery bought the brand, moved production back to Chicago, and started cranking the stuff out. Thanks to it now being available in 30 states, there is a new rite of passage: gathering friends together to make a Malört TikTok . And the timing with Pope Bob’s pope-ification couldn’t be more inspired.

Some might even call it a sign from God. According to Google, the search volume for "malört" even reached an all-time high with the recent papal election. Now, just wait until we have the first pope from Philadelphia.

He’ll be offering up "the jawn of Christ" and wheeling cases of Yard’s into St. Peter’s Basilica..