Salon: An Italian liqueur so pungent you want to "throw up or wash your mouth out"

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Friday, Apr 2, 2010 10:20 EDT

Fernet Branca: the trendy drink that makes you gag

Fernet Branca has been called the "liqueur of Hades," but adventurous San Franciscans just can't get enough of it

By Thomas Rogers



http://www.salon.com/food/faddy_foods/index.html?story=/food/feature/2010/04/02/fernet_branca

Fernet Branca is an Italian liqueur with a taste so pungent that your first sip has a good chance of making you either want to throw up or wash your mouth out with Pepto Bismol. Made up of over 40 different kinds of herbs and spices, the drink is often consumed as a digestif -- to help aid digestion after a large meal -- or as a hangover cure. After more than a century of popularity in Italy, Fernet's challenging taste is becoming increasingly trendy in the United States -- especially in San Francisco (So much so that, as Tasting Table recently pointed out, several Bay Area bar-restaurants have begun offering it on tap.)

Fernet Branca's intense effect on the palate is largely due to its extreme bitterness, though the drink also contains, among other exotic herbs, myrrh, gentian root, saffron, zedoary, chamomile, cardamom, aloe, and something called cinchona (the exact formula is kept strictly secret). San Francisco Weekly called it "black-licorice flavored Listerine," Robert Misch, the former head of the Wine and Food Society of New York called it the "liqueur of Hades" and wrote that drinking it is "like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer," and Betsy von Furstenberg was suspended from Actor's Equity in 1960 after secretly putting it into Tony Randall's onstage drink.

The drink is often consumed as a shot, or mixed with Coke. It often overtakes anything it is mixed with, but the Wall Street Journal's Eric Felten suggests mixing it with Vermouth and Bourbon.

[Richardo]

1. I get the same sensation from Mickey's Big Mouth

:shrug:

[Amerigo Vespucci]

2. Patient: "Doc, it hurts when I go like this." Doctor: "Then stop going like that!"

I gave this some careful consideration and my recommendation is to get them Mickeys off of your shopping list.

:rofl:

:toast:

[Richardo]

3. I haven't had one since 1977, but ... I relive it.

:scared:

[Amerigo Vespucci]

4. When my brother-in-law was a teenager he went on a lake, in a canoe...

...with a six pack of Hamm's Beer and some tuna sandwiches.

Ate the sandwiches and drank the beer under the hot New England summer sun and spend the next couple of days engaged in projectile vomiting.

He became a human mood ring...just saying the words "Hamm's Beer," decades later, would make his face transform into a dazzling series of emerald hues.

Didn't have the same problem with tuna sandwiches...time apparently healed that wound.

Not the actual lake or canoe, just an AMAZING coincidence when I went to Google Images looking for a pic:



:rofl:

[rcrush]

5. Guinness does the same thing to me.