Food & Drink

Malört Guide: Chicago's Bitter Liqueur

The wormwood liqueur locals love to make out-of-towners try — its history, where to order it, and what it actually tastes like (badly).

By the Extra Chicago editorial team·Updated Oct 20262 min read·2 sections

A bottle pouring liquor into a row of small shot glasses lined up on a bar (generic liqueur/shot photo; not an actual Malört bottle)

Photo: Rama Krushna Behera / Unsplash

The short version

✓Malört is a wormwood-based liqueur made in Chicago, famous for a bitterness that catches almost every first-time drinker off guard.
✓Getting a visiting friend or out-of-towner to try a shot, cold, is a genuine local rite of passage — a running joke with real staying power, not a marketing stunt.
✓It's widely available as a shot at bars across the city, so there's no need to seek out one specific venue to try it.
✓Approach it with curiosity and low expectations: the reaction on your face is genuinely part of the tradition.
✓One glass is the whole experience — nobody is expected to order a second, and most people don't.

What it is, and why it's a local institution

Malört is a wormwood-based liqueur, a style related distantly to absinthe, distilled and bottled in Chicago and defined almost entirely by its aggressive, lingering bitterness — a flavor most first-time drinkers describe somewhere between grapefruit rind and a burnt rubber band. It's not a sipping liqueur in the conventional sense; it's typically served ice-cold as a single shot, meant to be taken in one go rather than savored, because savoring it is, by most accounts, not really an option.

What makes Malört a genuine local institution rather than just an unusual regional spirit is the ritual around it. Longtime Chicagoans treat ordering a round of Malört for a first-time visitor as a small, affectionate prank — a way of watching someone's face fall in real time, and then welcoming them into a shared, half-joking club of people who've survived the first sip. It's not aimed at tourists specifically; locals do it to each other too, which is part of what keeps the tradition feeling genuine rather than staged for outsiders.

A mojito cocktail garnished with mint and lime on a bar counter, bartender in the background

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Where a more serious cocktail program might still keep a bottle of Malört behind the bar as a dare.

Lounge seating on a rooftop terrace overlooking a city skyline at dusk

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A gentler alternative to a Malört night, with a skyline view instead of a grimace.

How to actually try it

You don't need to hunt down one specific bar to have this experience — Malört is stocked widely enough across Chicago's bar scene that it's usually just a matter of asking, especially anywhere with a local, regular crowd rather than a purely tourist-facing menu. The best approach is to go in with genuine curiosity and genuinely low expectations: it's meant to be a shock, not a pleasant surprise, and the fun is largely in the anticipation and the immediate reaction, shared with whoever ordered it alongside you.

One shot really is the whole experience. Nobody orders Malört expecting to enjoy the flavor enough to have a second, and there's no social pressure to prove otherwise — the point was always the moment, not repeat consumption. If you want to chase it with something to reset your palate, most bartenders will have a suggestion ready, since they've clearly done this before with plenty of other visitors.