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Saturday, June 18, 2016

Ojen is back!!!

Legendre Ojen....$18.99 / 750ml

Ojen, a New Orleans Favorite, Is Back in the Liquor Cabinet
New York Times
Probably more than any city in America, New Orleans loves anise-flavored liqueurs. Yet it’s had a hard time holding on to them.

It had to live without its beloved absinthe for nearly a century until the famously volatile green elixir became available in the United States again in 2007. Now, just in time for Mardi Gras, it has been given back another treasured licorice liquor: Ojen.

This week, Ojen (pronounced OH-hen) returned to New Orleans shelves and glasses for the first time in years, thanks to the Sazerac Company, the locally based liquor business.

“We had a reasonable stash of old bottles of it,” said Mark Brown, the president and chief executive. “We sent our chaps in the lab to research Ojen and then create what they felt was a really good quality Ojen. They were able to benchmark it against the old bottles.” The new product’s full name is Legendre Ojen. A bottle costs about $20.

Ojen has a history almost as romantic as absinthe’s. First produced in the mid-1800s by a Spanish distiller in the small town of Ojen, it developed a rather cultured reputation. Picasso painted a bottle into his “Spanish Still Life.” Hemingway wrote about it in “To Have and Have Not.” And it was lapped up in New Orleans, where it was strongly associated with Mardi Gras. The liqueur was popular enough that it had its own namesake drink, the Ojen cocktail.

When the Spanish source decided to shut down production in the early 1990s, Martin Wine Cellar, a well-known New Orleans shop, panicked. It pleaded for one more run of the juice and got it: 6,000 bottles worth. But the last was sold in 2009.

“For seven years, it was a special find to hold your own bottle of Ojen,” said Chris Hannah, a renowned local bartender who works at Arnaud’s French 75 bar. “When you could get to a bottle, you’d hoard it.” Mr. Hannah has three bottles from the final run, and four from the 1930s.

Mr. Brown expects demand to quickly reach beyond the city. “If we start receiving orders from other states, we would absolutely ship it,” he said. (More Ojen drinking would amount to a win-win for the Sazerac Company: Aside from Ojen, the key ingredient in an Ojen cocktail is Peychaud’s Bitters, also made by Sazerac.)

Mr. Hannah said that having Ojen back would help New Orleans residents “feel more New Orleanian.”

“I personally hope it’ll forgo the Mardi Gras hype and return to brunch drinking etiquette,” he said.

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