One Memphis-area man’s trash became CH Distillery’s treasure after his neighbor posted a curious inquiry about a decades-old bottle of Malört on Reddit.
The Chicago-based distillery, which has exclusively produced the bitter-tasting wormwood spirit Malört since 2019, purchased the bottle from Ben Cissell, a Memphis native, for an undisclosed amount last week. The distillery also made a “large donation” — the exact amount also undisclosed— to a charity of Cissell’s choice: St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, headquartered in his hometown.
Cissell described feeling “a type of anxiety” as he and his wife, Melissa, made the seven-and-a-half-hour drive to Chicago to hand over the bottle.
“I knew the bottle was in the trunk. I checked it like three times before we left, just to make sure it was there, because my mind will play tricks on me,” he said.
The “ancient” bottle displays a label with the name of Mar-Salle Distillery in Chicago, which produced Malört between 1953 and 1986. The distillery then shut down permanently, and Malört production moved to Kentucky and Florida. It resumed production in Chicago in 2019, a year after CH Distillery purchased the Carl Jeppson Company from Patricia Gabelick, who once worked as the brand’s legal secretary.
The Malört team told the Sun-Times they believe it’s a knockoff bottle, as the name wasn’t trademarked during the time it might’ve been acquired. There’s also no mention of Carl Jeppson on the label. “Additionally, the bottle doesn’t have similar qualities to the older versions we have seen, for example the plastic cap,” a spokesperson said.
The spokesperson said “the plan is to keep the bottle as a part of Malört’s history; real or not, it’s definitely inspired and provides some exciting insight into what was going on back in the 1960s-80s.” It joins another old, mysterious bottle of Malört in the distillery’s possession, and the team is working on identifying the year of production of that bottle too, they said.
Cissell, 47, told the Sun-Times that the bottle he found was in his neighbor’s attic, who’d lived in the home since it was built in the 1970s. According to the spokesperson, Malört wasn’t sold outside of Chicago until 2010, so how it got to Memphis is unclear.
About a year ago, that neighbor moved out of his home on Cissell’s block in the Memphis-adjacent suburb of Bartlett. He’d been coming in and out of the house, clearing it out and fixing it up to sell, when one day he left a variety of items out on the curb for the garbage collector.
Five bottles of liquor caught Cissell’s eye. Among them, the Malört.
“When I asked him about the bottles, he said something like, those were from him and his buddies a long time ago,” Cissell told the Sun-Times. “So I’m guessing those may have been his from his early 20s, and they just sat up there [in his attic].”
He posted a photo of all the bottles to Reddit under the r/whiskey subreddit about two months ago, and commenters immediately identified the bottle of Malört. Another user re-shared it on the r/chicago subreddit, and it blew up even more there.
“This is the first time I’ve ever seen or heard of anything like it. I didn’t know that Malört was Chicago exclusive,” he said, adding that he’s not a big drinker to begin with. Being a Tennessean, Jack Daniel’s is his go-to spirit.
He got about a dozen messages asking him to name his price. He didn’t feel comfortable selling the bottle to random strangers on the internet, he said, so he reached out to CH Distillery, which was immediately interested.
At the distillery in Chicago, Cissell and his wife, along with members of the Malört marketing and operations team, got to taste the old liquor.
It “didn’t taste like Malort at all,” the Malört spokesperson said.
They believe that much of the alcohol had seemed to have been absorbed by the wormwood sprig inside the bottle (not found in modern bottles of Malört), leaving the distinct aftertaste more faint than usual.
But Cissell got to try a recently made bottle while in Chicago, and said he’d be adding it to his rotation.
“Next week, me and my buddies are going to get together and we’re going to play disc golf,” he said. “We are going to have a Malört round, and none of my disc golf friends have tried it.”
Malört’s team covered the Cissell’s stay in Chicago, which included a hotel, a visit to the distillery, merch and exclusive bottles of Malört. It was the Cissells’ first time in the Windy City, and a much-needed vacation for the couple, who’ve been unable to travel in recent years.
They got to dip their feet into Lake Michigan, walk along Navy Pier, eat Italian beef, deep dish pizza and Chicago-style hot dogs, and even got to visit Chinatown during their short trip.
“We’ve never experienced a downtown like Chicago,” Cissell said. “Everybody had a great attitude.” He and his wife said they appreciated the friendliness, cleanliness and cultural pride of the city, too.