DRINK LIKE A LOCAL

Love it or hate it, Malort is Chicago's drink.

Throwing back a shot of the bitter liquor is practically a rite of passage for many. If you stay long enough at any Chicago dive bar, you're likely to see people order a Chicago Handshake: a shot of Malort with an Old Style beer.

MALORT

Malort made its debut in Chicago in the 1920s, when Swedish immigrant Carl Jeppson began selling the traditional wormwood-based Swedish-style bitters on the Near North Side.

Jeppson skirted Prohibition-era laws by selling his liquor as a tonic to cure stomach worms and parasites.

Rumor has it that the cigar shop owner, and avid smoker, loved both selling and drinking Malort, not only because it padded his pockets, but also because it was rumored to be one of the only things his tobacco-ravaged tongue could actually identify.

OLD STYLE

Old Style was first brewed in 1902 by the Wisconsin-based G. Heileman Brewing Company, and became available in Chicago by the 1930s. But the connection between the brand and Chicago wasn't really sealed until 1950, when Old Style started sponsoring the Cubs.

Getting into Wrigley Field was big. Here you are, sitting in this iconic place, in this iconic city, drinking this particular beer. People started to build brand loyalty to it.

CHICAGO HANDSHAKE

When it comes to drinks associated with a particular city, New Orleans has the Sazerac, New York's got the Manhattan and Chicago has the Chicago Handshake: a shot and a beer as a chaser. But for a long time, any old beer and a shot would do. That's in part because, though Chicago's always had plenty of breweries, the city never really had a national beer brand in the way places like Milwaukee or St. Louis did. We were drinking all our beer, so there was never really a need to export.

Eventually, the companies that made Malort and Old Style decided to lay claim to the Chicago Handshake. But that was nothing more than good old-fashioned "marketing savvy." Cashing in on something that was already well established as Chicago's drink.