How to Make a Seven Days in Berlin, the Rum Sour Cocktail With a Surprising Cameo

What happens in the back of your throat when I say the word “Jägermeister?”

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Don’t close the page. This is a cocktail column, and what will conclude this brief story is, yes, a cocktail recipe with a small amount of Jägermeister in it, but I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t taste like you think it does. At least, it doesn’t have to.

It could just be my particular vintage or peer set, but I suspect many if not most of you have at least one aggressively unpleasant memory associated with the dark green brick of a bottle from Wolfenbüttel, Germany—so much so, that when we use it as an ingredient in drinks, we’ll sometimes just say “German herbal liqueur” on the menu as opposed to its actual name, just to get people to order it. Across the liquor world, I can’t think of a single brand that has flown higher and sank lower, or been the primary subject of so many bitterly hungover renunciations. I admit I was one of those people, so much so that for a period of years I couldn’t bear to even see Jägermeister poured, jet black and syrupy, into a shot glass. I’m here to say I had it wrong.

Those of us who overdosed on it in our youth tend to believe that Jägermeister emerged spontaneously, Athena-like, from the forehead of some frat guy in 1982, but it’s not so. Jägermeister has been around since 1934. It was invented by a young man named Curt Mast, a tinkerer and avid hunter (Jägermeister means “hunter master”) who concocted an herbal liqueur made from of 56 botanicals sourced across the world, sorted into four different macerates, blended and aged for nearly a year in enormous wooden barrels. All of which is to say, we’re not talking about Skittles-flavored vodka here. Most of how it’s made is perfectly in step with the darlings of the cocktail world—Chartreuse, Bénédictine, Fernet Branca—except only Jägermeister is singled out for ignominy. Why?

Some of it is the quantity of sugar, which is not insignificant, but most is due to a liquor importer and marketing genius named Sydney Frank. Frank is also the man who created the idea of a French vodka and would end up selling Grey Goose to Bacardi for a few billion dollars, but first, he was the Jägermeister guy, securing American distribution rights in the 1970s. What do you do with this stuff? The brand barely had a pulse, sputtering along among expat German communities with no wider market at all, until he had an idea to sell it as a frozen shot. All he had to do was get people to try it. His second revelation was “a pretty girl can always help [with] selling,” and so he hired some pretty girls he called “Jägerettes” to go to bars and convince patrons to take a shot of this dark herbal mystery. It worked: Jagermeister, ice cold and all at once, proved easy enough to take, and though it was initially designed as a post-meal sipper—what you’d call a digestivo in Italy or digestif in France—“Jäger” instead became something to rip shots of, to guzzle dropped in beer or to mix into “cocktails” with such noble pedigrees as the Red Headed Slut and Surfer on Acid. It became one of the biggest brands in the world.

Fast forward to today, you can see Jägermeister as a victim of its own success, seen by many as inextricable from college parties and stale-beer-soaked dive bars, but drop all that cultural baggage, and at the end of the day, it’s just an herbal liqueur like any other—one that is unusually mixable with other flavors. It lends itself to orchard fruits like apples and pears incredibly well, stirs beautifully with darker flavors like Fernet, coffee, or chocolate, and, as in the case of the Seven Days in Berlin, mixes brilliantly with tropical fruit. Combine a bit of Jägermeister with coconut and pineapple rums, lime juice, and a little sugar, and the intense licorice syrup you remember completely dissolves into the mix, revealing a new side to Jägermeister, one that can deepen and enrich other flavors without dominating them. The Seven Days in Berlin is part tiki drink, part Jägermeister, but more refined and adult than either.

It might be premature to tell your in-laws about your new fondness for Jägermeister, but perhaps the perfect time to say that you’ve been experimenting with German herbal liqueurs.

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Seven Days in Berlin

• 1 oz. pineapple rum
• 1 oz. coconut Rum
• 0.75 oz. Lime Juice
• 0.5 oz. Jägermeister
• 0.5 oz. demerara syrup

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker and shake hard on ice for eight to 10 seconds. Strain up into a coupe or cocktail glass, and garnish with a pineapple wedge, pineapple leaves, lime wheel, drops of angostura bitters on the cocktail foam, or really anything you like.

NOTES ON INGREDIENTS

Pineapple Rum: There are two types of pineapple rum: Distilled (bought from a store) and infused (adding pineapples to rum in your kitchen). The latter is what we want here, contributing not just flavor but a bit of juicy acidity, so there’s two ways to do this:

1. Make Pineapple Rum—one pineapple per bottle of white rum. Chop the pineapple into roughly 1-inch cubes, put it into a non-reactive container, pour rum over it. Let sit for 24 hours at room temp, then remove solids.
2. Use Pineapple Juice—in place of the 1 oz. Pineapple rum in the recipe, use 1 oz. white rum like Plantation 3-star or Flor de Cana, and 0.5 oz. pineapple juice.

Coconut Rum: Malibu is the biggest name here, and will work in a pinch, but it’s super sweet so you may need to dial back the demerara syrup. My favorite coconut rum is the Koloa Coconut, from Hawaii, still 40 percent alcohol and lightly sweetened, with a coconut flavor that evokes the plant more than it evokes sunscreen. If you like tropical drinks, it’s worth a detour to pick one up.

Demerara Syrup: The slightly less refined “demerara” syrup, as opposed to regular bleached sugar simple syrup, gives a bit more depth and acts as a bridge between the bright light tropical flavors and the dark herbaceousness of Jägermeister. It’s not strictly necessary—simple syrup works fine—but if you have it, use it. In either case, mix equal parts of sugar with hot water, and stir until the sugar is dissolved. If using demerara sugar (e.g. “Sugar in the Raw”) you might want to do this on a stove, not to even simmer it but just for the supplemental heat. The big crystals tend to dissolve much more slowly, and heat helps.

Jägermeister: This cocktail was specifically created to showcase Jägermeister’s surprising gifts, so I admit I haven’t tried it with anything else, but I can envision a lot of herbal liqueurs working here. Campari, for example, would almost make a Jungle Bird. Amaro Montenegro or Meletti would work I think, but it’s difficult to say. Experiment at your leisure.

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