Chartreuse (liqueur)
Chartreuse is a brand of herbal liqueurs produced by a company of the Carthusian monks of the Great Charterhouse ( La Grande Chartreuse in French ) near Grenoble in France .
history
According to the manufacturer, Marshal François-Annibal d'Estrées gave the Carthusian monks in Vauvert a recipe for an “elixir of long life” in 1605 . The originator of the recipe is unknown; it may have been made by a 16th century alchemist . However, it was initially forgotten and only parts of the complicated recipe are said to have been used. At the beginning of the 18th century the recipe was sent to the mother monastery La Grande Chartreuse , where the pharmacist Brother Jérôme Maubec examined it. In 1737 he had developed a manufacturing process for a healing drink, which is known as Élixir Végétal de la Grande Chartreuse (today with aAlcohol content of 69% vol.) Is still produced today - supposedly unchanged. In 1764 a milder variant with a lower alcohol content was added, the green herbal liqueur known today as Chartreuse Verte . The recipe was always kept secret, but in the years after the French Revolution , which closed the monastery and expelled the monks, it temporarily fell into the hands of the Grenoble pharmacist Liotard, who never made the liqueur himself. After the monks returned to the monastery in 1816, Liotard's heirs returned the recipe. In 1838 brother Bruno Jacquet developed a milder, yellow Chartreuse liqueur ( Chartreuse jaune ); A white followed in 1840, but - with an interruption between 1880 and 1886 - it was only produced until 1900. In 1860 (according to other sources 1869) a larger distillery was built in Fourvoirie ( Canton Saint-Laurent-du-Pont ) for production. In 1903 the production was nationalized and the monks had to leave France. As a result, the French state also sold the Chartreuse trademark rights to a private company, the Compagnie Fermière de la Grande Chartreuse . The monks therefore set up a new distillery in Tarragona and another in Marseille , where they continued to produce their liqueurs - known at the time as Une Tarragone . The site in Tarragona was not closed again until 1989, the one in Marseille as early as 1929, when the monastery succeeded in buying back the distillery and trademark rights and resuming production in Fourvoirie after the insolvency of the new operators. In 1935 a landslide destroyed the distillery. Production was relocated to the current Voiron location . The secret essence of herbs and spices on which the liqueurs are based is supposedly still mixed in the mother monastery, the Great Charterhouse , by only two monks. Apparently only three monks know the recipe at a time. The Chartreuse Diffusion sales company has been filling, packaging and shipping the liqueurs since 1970 .
Products
The various Chartreuse liqueurs consist of wine alcohol, sugar and the extracts of up to 130 different herbs and spices and mature in large oak barrels for five to eight years.
Chartreuse is now available in different versions: The best known and most widespread is Chartreuse Verte (green Chartreuse with an alcohol content of 55% vol.) And the somewhat more recent variant Chartreuse Jaune (yellow Chartreuse with an alcohol content of 40% vol.). The taste of the yellow chartreuse is sweeter and milder than the strong green one. In addition, there is also the Élixir végétal with currently 69% vol. (71% a few years ago), a jubilee version called 9 ° Centenaire from 1984 (when the Great Charterhouse was 900 years old) with 47% vol. and very long-matured VEP editions of yellow (42% vol) and green chartreuse (54% vol), each of which is delivered with a consecutive serial number in a wooden box.
In addition, other liqueurs are available under the Chartreuse brand or with the addition […] des Pères Chartreux , for example walnut liqueur ( La Noix des Pères Chartreux ), gentian liqueur ( Gentiane des Pères Chartreux ) and mugwort liqueur ( Génépi des Pères Chartreux ) but not all are offered internationally. Distribution in Germany is carried out by the Hamburg-based spirits store Borco-Marken-Import .
Others
In the 1950s and 1960s, Chartreuse was a popular party drink alongside the Escorial Grün herbal liqueur made in Germany . This is reminiscent of the hit song “Carthusian Knickebein-Shake”, sung by Lutz Jahoda , first in the GDR in 1963, and a year later also in the FRG in a recording with Will Brandes .
At the Bar Convent Berlin , Chartreuse Verte (green) received the Spirit of the Year 2007 award from a jury from the trade journal Mixology .
The chartreuse-liqueurs are pure or on ice as a digestive drink or as a long drink or high ball with juices or tonic water ( chartreuse Tonic ). Known cocktails with Chartreuse are Alaska ( Gin , Chartreuse Jaune, orange bitters ), Widow's Kiss ( Calvados , Chartreuse Jaune, Benedictine , Angostura ), Bijou (Gin, Chartreuse Verte, sweet vermouth , orange bitters) and Last Word (gin, Chartreuse Verte, Maraschino , lime juice).
literature
- André Dominé: The ultimate bar book. The world of spirits and cocktails. hfullmann publishers (Tandem Verlag), Potsdam 2008, ISBN 978-3833148026 , p. 572f.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Official website, accessed October 4, 2011
- ↑ Dominé, p. 572
- ↑ Musik-Sammler.de, the music collection management on the Internet , accessed on September 1, 2013.
- ↑ Musik-Sammler.de, the music collection management on the Internet , accessed on September 1, 2013.
- ↑ Mixology Bar Awards, Mixology magazine October 18, 2007 , accessed August 28, 2012.
Web links
- Information about the Carthusian liqueur (French, English and Spanish)
- Lars Reichardt: Silent happiness Article about the Chartreuse liqueur in SZ magazine No. 48/2013.