Chartreuse, a case study in how scarcity and authenticity can drive desirability | Hacker News Reader

Chartreuse, a case study in how scarcity and authenticity can drive desirability

bloomberg.com

33 pointsbrandonb44 comments

Once upon a time, many years ago, I was working in a bar in rural Ireland. I was 16 or 17, I was alone in the place, it was a slow afternoon, I was crouched down, putting bottles on shelves, idly wondering what the strongest drink - highest ABV - in this place was. Most spirits were about 40%, many less, some slightly more. At that moment I happened to look up and I swear a beam of sunshine at that moment lit on a bottle of green chartreuse above my head, highlighting the “55% ABV” on the label. In my memory, music also chimed. I just had to taste this stuff, so I poured a tiny drop into a glass. O. M. G. It. Was. _Vile_. To this day, it is my benchmark for how bad something tastes.

In fairness, I thought the same thing about most types of beer at that age. If you like cocktails and interesting flavors, Chartreuse is genuinely excellent and beloved by bartenders. There are bars that have drink programs that specialize in it, and this has been a thing since far before the shortage.

It's definitely strong and has an intense herbal flavor. There are far viler spirits, though (try Suze). Personally I find it an enjoyable sipper!

Malort tastes like Meyer's lemons (the ones you use to clean things instead of eat) and anise, most people without a strong anise culture would hate it.

Malort tastes like what it is: a cleaning solvent. It's a prank Chicagoans play on tourists. The authentic, artistically coherent version of Malort is Novasalus.

Malort improves a lot with a little airing out. Straight out of the bottle and into a shot glass tastes like poison, but if you leave it in a glass, maybe giving it a few swirls for a bit while doing something else (like trying to convince someone to try it for the first time), it tempers out quite a bit, and, while still bitter, becomes a drink that at least sometimes can be enjoyed.

But basically every amaro/bitter liqueur is better for this

I quite enjoy Suze on the rocks, but then again I also enjoy most amari.

It's very sweet. The thing here is nobody drinks it straight. Do equal parts Chartreuse, gin, Maraschino, and lemon juice (a Last Word); it's hard to hate, and a good introduction to what Chartreuse is about. My next move would be to put it in a Sazerac.

If you want to use it in a Sazerac, swap it in for the Peychaud's and soak a real sugar cube with it instead of using simple syrup. I don't personally like it, but IMO it's the only good entry point for it in terms of texture.

The other option is a Carthusian, which puts a 1/4 oz. in and swaps the Peychaud's with lemon bitters to offset with acid.

Gonna need to give this a whirl.

Throw it in hot chocolate in the winter after doing winter stuff. Though green is my preference for that, both work.

What? Chartreuse is delicious. But more importantly, the crazy ABVs are in overproof rum. Some are over 75%. Not advisable to drink neat. And much more disgusting.

For the curious, the Chartreuse liquor isn't the original formula, it was developed in the late 1800's, IIRC.

The original "secret elixir of eternal youth" from the crusades era is still available though, it's meant to be consumed as a medicinal tonic with a spoon. It comes in a cool small wooden bottle, I just scored and got three of them at my local Total Wine [3].

Edit: I just realized most probably aren't familiar with the history here. It's a fascinating story that starts with the crusades, involves the monks feeling both France and Spain, smuggling the recipe through prison, etc... [1] [2]

[1] https://www.chartreuse.fr/en/story/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur)

[3] https://www.totalwine.com/spirits/liqueurscordialsschnapps/h...

Do you have that first link in French? Thank you

A few years ago there was a headline about how the monks who make chartreuse are going to spend more of their time on monastic pursuits and we're going to run out of chartreuse. Well, that's how many secondary articles described https://www.wsj.com/articles/chartreuse-craft-cocktails-liqu...

As a highly-intelligent anti-consumerist well aware of marketing materials and yellow journalism and also a very skilled reader of text who never makes decisions based on headlines, I scrambled to get a bottle of yellow chartreuse and one of green chartreuse. Never having had them as they are, I have to say they're quite enjoyable liqueurs on their own. Good fun.

After having bought the bottles and when the scramble was no longer necessary, I sat down to look at what the news actually said and found that all they said was that they aren't expanding production. Good show.

Idk where you live but everywhere I look it’s still impossible to find. If you are lucky you might get a bottle for $100 but most places don’t have it, the only way to find it is to order online (if your state allows it)

I live in San Francisco. Paid like $80 or something back then but I drank the whole thing over the next few months after finding out there was nothing dramatic going on. $100 seems about what I'd expect. Is that historically a high price? I have no familiarity with the substance.

Yeah I live in flyover country (but a major city in flyover country) so maybe that’s the difference

Hey ! I'm precisely living in the Chartreuse Massif (in the French Alps), and regularly fly over the monks' monastery. Reading about our beloved drink here is fun ! I must say we also were worried when we learnt that they would reduce production (which had not been done in the monastery for a long time now, but in an adjacent city) but we're still able to buy it in our regular stores, so yes if feels like it was a marketing stunt.

It's not just the French! I'm obsessed with it too. It's fantastic.

I'm right there with you bud. I just wish it wasn't such a pain to get my hands on a bottle here in Portland so much of the time. So many cocktail nerds to compete with.

Now I want a Last Word, is quarter after two too early for a cocktail?

How can they call Chartreuse 'niche'? It's one of the most popular cocktail ingredients in recent times.

You're hitting on the main point of the article. It has been historically niche (limited supply, specialized use, intense/complex flavor) and recently expanded in popularity to transcend that niche status.

Bad title I guess.

I don't think that's quite it. Chartreuse had its big moment more than a decade ago, and the big story since then was the allocation program the supplier did, which made it scarce. It really was hard to get for a little while.

… and has a sufficiently long history that it became the name for a color as long ago as the 1880s. Pretty sure it’s the only drink that has a CSS standard color name derived from it (burgundy isn’t in the list).

(Now I want someone to come on and argue that papayawhip and chocolate are actually derived from colors of liqueurs)

How about aqua?

And bisque in a way.

"Craft" cocktails is itself a niche, and I would guess represents a pretty small portion of liquor sales.

Yeah you can buy it in pretty much every liquor store on earth, it even comes in those little single-slurp mini bar bottles, in tiny bottle stores in broke ass towns at the edge of the world.

For a couple years the headline story about Chartreuse was that it was becoming impossible to get (which is annoying because it's an important ingredient in a bunch of super-popular cocktails, most notably the Last Word), owing to the monastery allocation scheme. But last I heard, you can pick up both the Yellow and Green at Binnys, which is the neighborhood liquor store chain in Chicagoland.

The Carthusians make an interesting story, but what I think is the bigger story is the collapse of the liquor market broadly. I think but can't cite sources that what's happened is post-pandemic shifts pushing bars out of business, and bars in turn significantly cutting back orders. Whatever it is, Eagle Rare was supermarket whiskey in 2010, was an back room allocation whiskey in 2021, and is back on the shelves again. Pretty much every whiskey is now gettable in a way it wasn't just a couple years ago.

Jim Beam even had to halt production due to the oversupply: https://www.fooddive.com/news/jim-beam-pauses-production-ken...

We stock Chartreuse at our bar, not easy, and we occasionally have to modulate the cocktails on the menu to slow customers down a bit. The Bay Area itself gets an allocation each month, which is then further allocated to individual establishments.

The pandemic introduced so many weird shifts in demand for so many things, we're still not back at normal.

In this case, I think another factor is that the monastery decided to not ship to countries outside of Europe at all any more, and to reduce volume altogether. That introduced some shortage to panic buying alone, but it also meant that all American suppliers now had to import from EU resellers, which is not a big deal, but takes some time.

I think part of it is new information showing no benefit from alcohol consumption, but possible harm even at low levels of consumption. In 2026, alcohol is a health risk.

https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2026-06-09/...

It always was a health risk; nobody seriously drank booze for the health benefits, did they??

Wine certainly. Guinness was marketed as being good for you and not uncommon for pregnant women to drink it. Old liqueurs were often considered medicine, with Chartreuse from the article being one. Doctors used to prescribe alcohol during prohibition, but that probably doesn’t count here.

But there is new information and new advice.

https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2025/08/alcohol-consu...

There was some data that suggested a correlation between moderate/low drinking and a slight improvement in health (Like 1-2 glasses of wine and I think specifically cardiovascular health?). New studies have shown that this was mostly a sampling artifact: people with health problems were less likely to drink at all, and that biased the data.

...and I still make the Last Word with subbed-in Génépy des Alpes to this day.

The Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_Chartreuse and a nice documentary on their lives, Into Great Silence - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Great_Silence

The full documentary on Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8A8aT3eb2s

Makes me think of Benedictine, which I kind of forgot about for a while now. Nice stuff. Now owned by Bacardi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9n%C3%A9dictine

We have a small bar in Aarhus, Denmark called Lecoq that, for some years at least, was the bar in the world that sold most bottles of Chartreuse. I should make sure to stop by again soon.

It was only recently when I learned of, and was absolutely fascinated by, Carmelite Water and its derivatives:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmelite_Water

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klosterfrau_Melissengeist

The existence of these tonics is a source of regret, because I have a lifetime vow to abstain from alcohol, but things like this sound absolutely delicious. I think alcohol is often mixed-in to discourage overindulgence, honestly.

saved you a click: It's Chartreuse

Reply on news.ycombinator.com