“You know, it'd be really obvious for me to just talk about Malört.”
Kristina Magro, who manages the Lone Wolf Tavern in Chicago’s West Loop, is on the phone with me because I’ve asked her to tell me about a spirit that embodies her town. And she’s right: it would be easy to talk about the notoriously bitter wormwood liqueur, once described to me as “the liquid equivalent of surviving a Chicago winter.” Malört is synonymous with the city (despite the fact that, until very recently, it had been produced in Florida for the last 30 years). Ask a Chicago bartender for a bottle on their backbar that says “Chicago,” and they’ll almost certainly reach for the Jeppson’s, which doesn’t say “Chicago” so much as scream it directly into your mouth.
Magro herself, of course, isn’t necessarily opposed to the stuff. She respects the enduring tradition of the infamous Chicago handshake—a shot of Malört paired with a cold Old Style. But it isn’t lost on her that Chicago’s most notable hometown liqueur is famous not for being good, or even acceptable, but for being so terribly abrasive that drinking it seems like an act of pure masochism. But we’re not on the phone to talk about that. Instead, we’re talking about fruit.
Magro started bartending in the Chicago suburbs before she turned 21, and it didn’t take long for her to decide to make her career behind the bar. “My mother loved that,” Magro says, wryly. “I was like, ‘I'm going to be the best bartender in Chicago!’ And she was like, ‘... What the fuck?’” (For what it’s worth, Mom eventually got on board.)
Magro’s first gig behind the stick was at an Irish pub owned by a Greek family, a few years before well-made cocktails made their revival—back then, it was the heyday of the saccharine “Martini,” from key lime to chocolate. “Their whole entire well was filled with every single flavor of DeKuyper you could imagine to make these Martinis with,” says Magro.
Within a few years, Magro went from shaking Key Lime Martinis at the pub to serving Mint Juleps at a Lincoln Park horse-racing bar to posting up at the clubby Chicago Cuts Steakhouse, which happened to be across the street from Drumbar. Back then, Drumbar was brand-new, a bar and lounge situated in the Raffaello Hotel with good, interesting drinks and nary a DeKuyper Razzmatazz bottle in sight. Drumbar’s bartenders would come hang out at Magro’s bar on their breaks; she’d post up at their bar after her shifts and talk shop. She was eager to learn from them, and transfixed by the creativity on display. “I'd go and pick their brain while they were on their lunch break about stuff I was trying to do, because I got really excited about having a creative outlet,” she says. “I remember having my first properly made Old Fashioned by them. They had their own Eagle Rare barrel, and my mind was fucking blown.”
Drumbar not only catalyzed Magro’s cocktail curiosity; it served as a career springboard, too. One of those bartenders got the opportunity to run his own program—Fulton Market Kitchen—and he asked Magro if she wanted to be his bar manager. She was game. From there, Magro racked up a string of gigs that, together, served as her self-styled spirits curriculum: an intensive cocktail education at Bordel and Fulton Market Kitchen; deepening her beer knowledge at Pub Royale; learning Latin American spirits at Estereo; and getting to work for one of the 21st century’s most influential bartenders, Jim Meehan, at Prairie School. “If you can't tell, I get bored very easily,” says Magro. “I'm constantly trying to challenge myself ... I thought it would be in my best interest to try and see every facet of this industry possible.”
“In the Midwest, we don’t have the tropical fruit, we don’t get citrus, but we have a bunch of beautiful strawberries, raspberries, stone fruits, Concord grapes ... all this dope stuff.”
At Lone Wolf Tavern, Magro was challenged yet again: this time, with running a high-volume bar in the tourist-heavy West Loop. Lone Wolf is one of the only taverns on Restaurant Row, and Magro says they get a lot of out-of-towners in the bar (many of whom are waiting on their burgers at Au Cheval, which is next door and often has an hours-long wait). For Lone Wolf, that’s a captive audience of people wanting to see what Chicago has to offer. “When I took over the program, I really wanted to capitalize on that situation,” says Magro.
Magro got to work. She made Lone Wolf’s beer list purely local, including a few highly allocated beers from 3 Floyds Brewing Co., and worked to make sure that every single cocktail had some kind of Chicago ingredient in it, be it honey from a nearby rooftop hive, locally made ginger beer, or handmade bitters courtesy of one of their bartenders. “I feel like a lot of bars around the U.S. always have a nod to something: a nod to New York, a nod to California, a nod to whatever,” says Magro. “But why don't we just showcase what our city has to offer, especially if a lot of these people don't even live here? Let's put Chicago on a platform. I don't feel like people do that enough.”
So, yeah, when Kristina Magro talks about Chicago, she could talk about Malört. But she doesn’t need to. “We have a lot of other people doing some really cool things, and I don't think they get the recognition they deserve.” Which brings us back to the fruit.
Jenny Solberg Katzman was raised with what she characterizes as “a very Midwestern upbringing”—a lot of honest, do-it-yourself hard work, in a family of bootstrapping entrepreneurs. Her family members have all worked on an assembly line at some point, sometimes together. She and her siblings weeded the yard on Sundays and mowed the lawn in their bathing suits. One chore Katzman had that perhaps not many other Chicago third-graders did: mashing up apples, pears, and other fruit on a handmade, bike-powered fruit chopper. (She lovingly calls it “that bike contraption.”)
The Solberg children were on that bicycle chopper because their dad, Charlie, made traditional eau-de-vie out of their backyard. Charlie, who played professional hockey in Austria as a young man, worked in his off-season as a fruit seller. In the process, he fell in love with traditional European fruit brandies, and the art of making them. By the time he was raising his family back home in the Chicago suburbs, where he grew up, backyard brandy-making was the Solberg family hobby. And for many years, it was just that: a hobby. “We were that crazy family,” says Katzman, laughing. “Like, ‘Oh, the Soldberg kids ... what are they doing now?’”
Eight years ago, long after outgrowing her perch on That Bike Contraption, Katzman was living in San Francisco, married and working in sales for a tech company. But with time, her husband pointed out that Katzman’s heart seemed to belong to another line of work. “He said, ‘You are so passionate talking about this process, and what your family does, and it tastes amazing ... why don't you do something about it?’” So, she approached her dad with the idea of growing their quirky family hobby into a commercial operation.
His answer: “I've been dying for one of you guys to ask me that.”
“Cherry brandy is a traditional thing that everybody thinks about as, like, ‘Ooh, I put kirschwasser in my fondue.’ But not this one.”
The one non-negotiable: the business had to be based in Chicago, not only because it was home—where Charlie was born and raised—but also because it would allow the family business easy, close access to one of the richest fruit-growing regions in the country. Rhine Hall opened its doors in Chicago two years later, in 2013. Katzman doesn’t have to chop fruit on the bike contraption anymore, but its legacy lives on in Rhine Hall’s logo, which includes a bicycle wheel.
Midwestern agriculture is so much more than unending fields of corn, soy, and wheat. “In the Midwest, we don't have the tropical fruit, we don't get citrus, but we have a bunch of beautiful strawberries, raspberries, stone fruits, Concord grapes ... all this dope stuff,” says Magro. When she thinks about the Midwest, and what makes her proud to live there, she thinks about the bounty of fruit the region has to offer—and no one, she adds, showcases that better than Rhine Hall, which sources nearly all of its fruit from within about 70 miles of Chicago. Plums, pears, apples—and, of course, the tiny, tart Michigan cherries that form the base of Rhine Hall’s cherry brandy, or kirschwasser, which is one of Magro’s favorites. “It's just a beautiful spirit, and a beautiful way to showcase what the Midwest has to offer,” she says.
Sarah Schmitt, who has tended bar in Chicago since 2007 and has worked for Rhine Hall since 2016, dispels a lot of common myths around brandy when doing her work as the brand’s educator and ambassador: no, it doesn’t have to be cloyingly sweet, nor made from grapes, nor aged. And the kirschwasser stirs up similarly dated notions, she says. “Cherry brandy is a traditional thing that everybody thinks about as, like, ‘Oh, I put kirschwasser in my fondue.’ But not this one.”
“In wine, you get to talk about terroir, and I think fruit brandy is the spirit category where you can really, really talk about that.”
Contrary to the kirsch that an Austrian grandma might have tucked away in a cupboard, Rhine Hall’s interpretation is dry, complex, and very much devoid of any Robitussen associations. “As a person who does not care for cherry flavor at all, the cherry brandy itself is one of my favorites to work with and also enjoy,” says Schmitt. The spirit also has a surprising trace of nuttiness to it, almost akin to an amaretto—a byproduct of Rhine Hall’s whole-fruit production philosophy, whereby some of the cherries’ pits are thrown into the mash alongside the fruit itself. “So in addition to having that bright, tart cherry taste that's really lovely, it also has that earthy, nutty, sort of unknown thing that you just sit there and go, ‘Oh, that's really interesting.’ It's one that kind of keeps pulling you back in.”
Midwestern fruit, adds Schmitt, seems like it was born to be booze. “Everything is really ripe and really juicy, and you get this really cool, fresh stuff that just wants to ferment,” she says. “And as a result, we get something that is just so big and bold as a spirit.” With such a tight relationship to the region’s agriculture, Rhine Hall’s work is heavily linked to climate and seasonality: late-season snowfalls, heavy rain, or a summer that takes forever to arrive might delay the distillery’s production calendar by weeks, and shifts in climate can impact a spirit’s profile just like it could with wine. “In wine, you get to talk about terroir, and I think fruit brandy is the spirit category where you can really, really talk about that,” says Schmitt. “Our kirschwasser is not going to be the same as one made in New York, or in France, because the cherries aren't the same, and our specific climate isn't the same.”
Katzman has a vivid memory from Rhine Hall’s very early days: she’s driving a 26-foot truck (the biggest truck you’re allowed to drive without a commercial driver’s license, she adds) up from Chicago to Michigan. Atlas, her black Mastiff-Labrador mix, is a little puppy, curled up in the passenger seat beside her. She recalls “jumping out of the truck, and the farmers being like, ‘There's some blond girl from Chicago here ... why are you asking for 20,000 pounds of fruit?’” And, of course, then driving those 20,000 pounds of fruit back down to Chicago with her pup riding shotgun. “That vision of him sitting next to me in the truck will forever be in my memory of starting the business,” she says.
Atlas doesn’t curl up on the front seat quite so easily anymore—he now weighs 120 pounds, and is a larger-than-life celebrity presence at Rhine Hall’s tasting room—and as the business has grown, Katzman isn’t solely responsible for trucking tens of thousands of pounds of fruit across state lines by herself. But Rhine Hall is still a small operation, and still laser-focused on making the spirits they set out to make with care and pride.
A lot of small startup distilleries, says Schmitt, jump into pumping out quick-turnaround products like vodka or gin, which have better margins and quicker turnarounds. “I think what's really exceptional is that Rhine Hall makes 16 different spirits and not one of them is any of those things,” says Schmitt. “It follows a very traditional and old-school methodology of being patient, and making something of quality. We're not a big place, but what we accomplish I think is pretty massive.”
Words by Gray Chapman Graphics by Ryan Troy Ford
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