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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
