Welcome To Wonkette Happy Hour, With This Week's Cocktail: WORSE

Cheer up. It could be WORSE. Oh, wait, it is WORSE. Here's how to make it.

Just like it says on the bottle.

Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. It’s Halloween, and we’ve been serving all sorts of green, glowing, eldritch cocktails at the bar. But I thought you deserved something truly terrifying. Let’s skip the theatrics and pick up the most infamous bottle on my rail — Malort. And then … let’s make it worse. Much worse. No turning back now. Time to make a bottle I simply call … WORSE. Here’s the recipe.

WORSE

750 ml Malort (1 bottle)

6 oz sliced Hormel pepperoni

2 oz malt vinegar

1 ½ oz toasted sesame oil

1 oz molasses

1 T Maxwell House ground coffee

12 shakes Angostura bitters

Sauté the pepperoni in a medium saucepan until crisp. Drain the oil from the pan and save the pepperoni for later use. Add pepperoni oil, sesame oil, and coffee to the Malort. Place in the freezer overnight. In the morning, poke a hole in the frozen fat and pour off the liquor, straining to catch any fat droplets. Add vinegar, molasses, and bitters. Stir and pour into a bottle. Keeps indefinitely (it will be impossible to tell when this goes bad).

So … yeah. That sure is a recipe. Let’s cut to the chase: This bottle is an affront to the eyes of God and Man. It looks absolutely horrible. It tastes worse. It won’t kill you. It won’t turn your stomach. It is deeply, terribly bitter, but not quite bitter enough to make you queasy. And yet, despite all that, I found myself sipping on a shot of this at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday again and again, entranced by the dreadful flavor of burnt pepperoni and despair. By 1 p.m., I could still feel the burn. I would ask Rebecca for hazard pay, but I’ve got no one but myself to blame for this monstrosity. Shub-Niggurath, Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, might find this bottle a bit much.

We might as well start by answering the obvious questions:

Q: What the hell?

Jeppesen Malort created this spirit in Chicago in the 1930s. It has never left the city of Chicago, for good reasons. It was freely sold during Prohibition. No one wanted to consume it willingly. Interest in Malort surged in the 2020s. Fans wrote their own advertising slogans for the spirit. These slogans include:

Malort: Tonight’s the night you fight your Dad.

Malort: Pumpkin spice for sadists.

Malort: When you need to unfriend someone in person.

Malort: These pants won’t s**t themselves.

Malort: The champagne of pain.

It tastes of pencil shavings and existential dread. It has a long, lingering, bitter aftertaste that will not go away, no matter how much you try to wash it down, no matter how much you scrape your tongue, no matter what gods you pray to.

Q: Why the hell?

Honestly, Malort doesn’t live up to the hype. Don’t get me wrong, it tastes bad — really, really bad. But it’s pretty odorless, and the dreadful finish doesn’t show up until the very end of the shot. I wanted to convert Malort from a regrettable choice into the devil’s own train wreck — a nightmare from the moment you bring your nose near the fluid until late in the night. But it had to be drinkable — I didn’t want to simply layer multiple bitter ingredients on top of the signature Malort burn.

I decided to make this bottle of Malort a dive bar in a glass — a summary of the scents and tastes of a nasty Chicago bar, within reason. (No effluvia, please.) My favorite dive bars have a carousel of cheap pizza rotating on the back bar, so pepperoni seemed like a good start. Malt vinegar from limp French fries seemed natural as well. So did roasted nuts from the sesame oil. The molasses was an inspired choice from a friend — a little sweetness to elevate the bitter, but adding a different style of bitterness. The coffee added another bitter note and an ominous color. The bitters lashed everything together in a unified, ghastly experience. Best of all, the distinctive Malort flavor was dragged from the end of the shot into the middle of the taste profile, prolonging the horrors. I don’t expect to sell a lot of this drink, but it’s going to be a hell of a “double or nothing” shot for those stubborn customers who insist that Malort “isn’t that bad.”

Let’s talk ingredients. I know, I know, but it’s a tradition and we can’t skip it now:

No, I will not explain this photo.

Malort: There is no substitute. Be grateful.

Pepperoni: I used the cheapest pepperoni I could find; anything more expensive wouldn’t be true to the dive-bar feel I was going for. It’s not much fun to snack on after being cooked, but you get what you pay for.

Malt vinegar: The vinegar’s tang adds an extra layer to the drink. Add this near the end of the process, or it will get lost in the pepperoni and sesame oil.

Sesame Oil: This is a really nice oil to use as a fat wash in Asian cocktails, like my Haiku. Here, it adds more roasted flavors to enhance the pepperoni’s acridity without actually burning it.

Molasses: A little sugar to elevate the bitter notes and give them room to express themselves, while adding an entirely new bitter element to the bottle. You’re welcome.

Angostura bitters: The disparate elements of the bottle needed something to lash them together. Classic Angostura turned the trick.

My home bar is Hemingway’s Underground, the hottest cocktail bar in pretty little Medina, Ohio. I’m behind the stick Wednesday-Saturday, 4-10. Last call’s at midnight. Swing on by and I’ll make a drink for you … or anything else from our little Happy Hour here at Wonkette.

OPEN THREAD!