Pete
“I really have no idea what it is I sell,” a Chartreuse Diffusion president told The New Yorker in 1984. “I am very scared always. Only three of the brothers know how to make it — nobody else knows the recipe. And each morning they drive together to the distillery. And they drive a very old car. And they drive it very badly.”
Chartreuse is so good that they named a color after it. On face, it is an herbal spirit that has been made by a monastery in France for over 900 years. As of press time, it comes in five forms: green, yellow, VEP green, VEP yellow, and grande elixir, a 69% cask-strength version that is banned in the United States, because the monks refuse to retract or qualify their claim that it has medicinal properties. “VEP” is an acronym for a bunch of long French words that mean “aged for a long time;” it is meant to be sipped, not thrown in a cocktail.
Green chartreuse is a load-bearing component of a Last Word; yellow chartreuse is a load-bearing component of an Alaska or a Corpse Reviver #2.
Here are three fun facts to know about chartreuse.
There are no commercial substitutes for any form of chartreuse. The closest spirit analog is Benedictine, which is very good but has a massively different flavor profile. Benedictine is better to think of as an herbal spirit, halfway between an amaro and chartreuse. Benedictine is a load-bearing component of a Monte Carlo. (If you’ve never made a Monte Carlo, make a Monte Carlo.)
No one person on earth knows the full recipe for chartreuse. A handful of monks have each split knowledge of parts of the recipe for 900 years. These have been passed down according to a complicated process.
Chartreuse is one of the only spirits that can develop over time in the bottle. As a result, there are vintages of chartreuse, some dating back centuries, tracking through global conflicts (at one point the distillery moved to Spain, for reasons, which heavily changed the flavor profile) and other societal upheaval. I have had chartreuse that tastes like cannabis, chartreuse that tastes like tarragon, chartreuse that tastes like honey, chartreuse that tastes like the farmers market, chartreuse that tastes like laying on your back in the Windows XP wallpaper in full sun.
And so, calmly ignoring the massive stash of all five forms of Chartreuse in my basement, across two centuries of vintages, and multiple instances of smuggling the grand elixir past customs officials, let us note that there is, currently, a global shortage of Chartreuse, and there has been one since May of 2021.
I have received conflicting explanations for this, from “everyone is drinking more now that the world has opened back up” to “the monks are in a labor dispute,” neither of which I can corroborate with any quantity of googling. (I did a lot of googling before writing this.) The only reliable, real-time sources I can find with any confirmable sense of what’s going on are Reddit, which says that it’s over and it’s not over; and my local whiskey bar, Longman & Eagle, which just received its first case of green chartreuse in over a year. My bartender called me to tell me the news. They ran out before I arrived, three hours later.
You haven’t ignored the stash. Fine. I get it. It’s right there. I have been rationing it very slowly for over a year. Because who knows when this will be over? I’ll know it’s over when I can walk up to a liquor store within 10 miles of my house and buy a bottle of VEP yellow, which is historically the hardest one to source. While, yes, you can order it special from big-box alcohol megachain Binny’s, I have found precisely one reliable walk-up spot for VEP yellow in 15 years of living here: Vas Foremost, on Milwaukee/California. Pete, the owner, is a good guy, and I know he is a good guy because he hides the yellow VEP behind the green VEP, because he knows that every so often I’m going to find a step stool, climb up, and dig out the yellow VEP for myself. Sometimes I think I am the only customer for yellow VEP chartreuse in the third-largest city in America, a drinking town so infamous that we literally have our own citywide dare shot. And yet now, I look up at the shelf where both VEPs are supposed to be, and I see two price tags, nothing else.
Longman is going to get its chartreuse through wholesale channels, which aren’t available to mortals like myself. Their receiving chartreuse is a positive sign that something is happening, but we don’t know what, and we also don’t know how much people are going to charge once the supply chain resolves itself. (When the world isn’t collapsing, Chartreuse hovers around $80 for a regular bottle, and $150 for a 1-liter VEP bottle. Current resale prices are… not that.)
People want chartreuse. There is no substitute for it. This will end someday. So I’m asking Pete. Pete is a half-block from my PO box. Every time I go to the post office, I swing by and ask: hey Pete, got chartreuse yet?
Naw. We’re trying, though! Everybody asks.
Everybody asks. I know.
I thank him, walk out, bike home.