My kingdom for a steady supply of Chartreuse. Or so wrote Shakespeare—I think—in the early 1590s, about a decade before François-Annibal d’Estrées published his famed 1605 Chartreuse recipe. Four centuries later, as the modern cocktail world remains in the throes of a Chartreuse shortage, we are left clamoring for alternatives. While there are any number of off-the-shelf liqueurs that could work in a pinch, some bartenders take a different, more hands-on approach.
For Lukas B. Smith, cocktail director at Washington, D.C.’s The Line Hotel and its bar, No Goodbyes, that involves using about 70 botanicals measured out in specific ratios to develop a signature liqueur. “We call it the Green Dream,” he says.
Smith’s labor of love is more than a decade in the making, predating any particular shortage. His efforts began in 2013 as a fascination, perhaps obsession, and after a decade of iterations and experimentations, his fully formed Green Dream came together with fortuitous timing, given the current Chartreuse crisis. “We’re in a desert right now,” he says. “It’s a scarcity market.”
No Goodbyes is one in a string of bars around the world that have stepped up to find a substitute. But not everyone is as exacting as Smith.
When Portland, Oregon’s Take Two, which opened in April of this year, found that no single substitute was the perfect fit on its own, they decided to take matters into their own hands. For the bar’s owner and operator, David Sigal, that meant combining three products on the Chartreuse continuum: two local offerings, Elixir Ver Liqueur and Accompani Flora Green, with a high-proof expression from Italy, Enrico Toro Centerba. Ver provides herbaceousness, while Flora Green offers spicy, savory qualities; Centerba—which is 70 percent ABV—provides the oomph.
Take Two’s blend isn’t an exact replica. “It’s like sisters, not twins,” Sigal says. “They’re in the same realm but are different, and I think it’s a cool opportunity to try something new.” He puts the blend to use in the Green Day, with gin, ginger, lime and a syrup of jalapeño, mint and cucumber.
Adrian Foo, principal bartender at Singapore’s Jigger & Pony, has also taken “creative freedom” in his bespoke take on the liqueur, which he developed after observing that increased demand for Chartreuse has continued even amid the ongoing shortage.
Jigger & Pony’s ingredient is also close to the original, yet skewed to the bar’s own preferences. Through an extensive R&D process, they settled on a combination of available liqueurs and ingredients: mint, vetiver root, angelica root and gentian for bitter and herbal notes; chamomile and violet for floral accents; clove, cinnamon and nutmeg for spice; and citrus to brighten and round the whole thing. The house Chartreuse also calls for a unique finishing touch: “Chardonnay wine is incorporated for a fruity complexity of green apples,” Foo says.
He deploys the ingredient in Jigger & Pony’s popular take on the Nuclear Daiquiri. “Making our own Chartreuse allows us to have full control over its quality and flavor profile, which ensures it can be tailored to complement our cocktails perfectly,” Foo says. “It’s truly both an art and science.”
At The Line in D.C., meanwhile, Smith has been given free rein and the resources to unleash his inner creative Carthusian wizard. Using an endless array of plants, herbs and roots, he’s developed over 100 different botanical extracts, which he mixes and matches to build ingredients ranging from amari and vermouth to more esoteric pursuits, such as an incredible peated fernet.
The Green Dream has long been his passion project, though. “I do believe that we’ve captured much of the classic magic of green Chartreuse,” he says, describing a profile with sweet herbaceousness, mint and citrus up front, a midpalate that’s full and round, all grounded with green and earthy flavors and a lasting finish. “Altogether, we come across a bit fresher and fruitier than the classic, and I’m all for that,” he says.
To reach that result, Smith used to create an infused syrup and then follow a process similar to making limoncello. Today, though, he follows a method known as correcting, which he picked up with an assist from Darcy O’Neil’s Fix The Pumps, a 2010 book detailing the golden age of the soda fountain with hundreds of recipes. Correcting is a standardized extraction system for tweaking and scaling with consistency. For example, if Smith adds 10 grams of cinnamon bark into 100 milliliters of high-proof spirit to create a tincture, he’ll eventually remove the cinnamon and have less volume than he started with due to absorption. Following this technique, he “corrects” the volume back to the 100 milliliters he started with using the original liquid. “With this flexibility, it becomes easy to make everything from 100-milliliter test samples to 1,000-liter batches using the same ingredients,” he says.
For his Green Dream, Smith now prepares three spirituous herbal concentrates. A higher-proof concentrate combines more than 15 plants—“These account for the brighter, fresher and most concentrated aromas,” such as lemon balm, peppermint and sweet fennel, Smith says—while a lower-proof, whole-botanicals elixir brings together bitter, savory, earthy and herbaceous notes with more than 50 ingredients, such as angelica, coriander, arnica blossom and balm of Gilead. Without adding sugar, Smith calls on the implied sweetness of several aromatics, like wintergreen, orange and fennel. The third concentrate, which Smith says is a secret, gives the liqueur its color. “Manipulating the botanical blend to highlight certain colors and textures is where, perhaps, the sublimation from a technical to an artistic activity is achieved,” he says. Thanks to those mystery ingredients, the liqueur is an entrancing fairy green.
“I wish I could tell you that I’m using rotary evaporators and sonicators to execute the Dream, but, if Darcy is to believed in Fix the Pumps, I’ve evolved scarcely past the 19th-century pharmacists using their medicine-making skills to compound flavors for their soda fountains; all that and time,” Smith says.
There’s no need for a high-tech solution, after all, which is fitting. It’s not as if that’s what the monks are using, Smith notes. “I take solace in knowing that the green magic that has entranced people all over the world for the last 400 years is made with simple tools as well.”