I normally don’t write about liqueurs here on the site, but considering Jager seems to be such an undying part of drinking culture writ large, I thought it might be interesting to write a few words on it.
Back in college, one of the biggest revelations I had was that I actually liked poetry. Prior to taking a poetry class with California’s literal poet laureate, I thought it was a literary form that just wasn’t for me: I disliked flowery-for-flowery’s-sake diction, impenetrable references only the author could unpack, and how utterly unassailable anything seemed to be simply because it was meaningful to the person who produced it. Very early into my course, a student read a poem of exactly that type in class and our professor absolutely savaged him in front of thirty of our peers.
To my shock and delight, it turned out that I just disliked bad poetry. And as far as the good stuff goes, there’s actually a rather beautiful poem written around the label of your typical bottle of Jägermeister—a product name, incidentally, that translates to “Master Hunter.” Translated from German to English in a way that preserves rhyme, it reads as follows:
This is the hunter's badge of glory:
That he protects and tends his quarry,
Hunts with honor, as is due,
And through the beast to God is true.
Yes, the holy cross above the head of the deer is there for a reason. In four lines, this liqueur has something to say about the nature of man’s relationship with the larger natural world and the divine: specifically, that the true hunter sees the game in the forest as a manifestation of God himself, which means in turn that even the smallest of woodland critters is worthy of respect and moral consideration. As such, the act of taking life must be balanced by a love of those animals, and in turn, small acts of conservation—and perhaps faith in general—hold a value higher than any trophy.
Take a moment to contemplate, if you will, how we got from there to “here.” And by that, I mean the present context where rowdy biker dives and clubs catering to college kids sell chilled shots of this product that people slam on the counter while yelling “YAY-GER!”
What in the hell happened?
All due credit to Jagermeister for perhaps the most impressive pivot in all of the spirit world. Rather than a stodgy drink sold to old European men after dinner to aid digestion of a big meal (a digestif, they call them), Jager rebranded themselves as the drink of choice of rock stars and adventurous twenty-somethings looking to replicate their icons’ badassery.
Quite literally, Jager went from this…
…to this.
So here today, let me evaluate Jagermeister, borrowing a little bit of the old and a little bit of the new. And by that, I mean drinking Jager at room temperature, and then slamming it back as an ice cold shot.
Neat, Slow, and Steady
Quite honestly, Jager isn’t bad and it’s far from a meme drink, though I will say this: if you don’t like black licorice, you won’t like it. More than anything else, Jager has a brooding, intense kind of anise / licorice flavor. However, you’ll quickly notice there’s a lot of sweet complexity, including prunes and no shortage of Coca-Cola. It actually reminds me of one of my absolute favorite sodas: Moxie. It’s popular on the upper east coast (and seemingly nowhere else), but it’s basically coke with a little bit of a black licorice undercurrent that knocks the sweetness down a little.
Now that I taste it a little more, I think maybe the best way to describe it is “Brooding, but soft.” It’s like how just about everyone—from your edgy niece to your aging mom—tends to like at least a few songs from The Cure. Jagermeister doesn’t give off a lot of alcohol reek, and it’s not absolutely dripping with sugar. And yet, it’s definitely an Amaro: it reminded me a lot of Averna, actually.
Long story short, Jagermeister is a quality product.
Iced up, straight back
Now, I’ll be honest: I approached this part of it with a little trepidation. It’s probably been a good six or seven years since I last did a shot (and at that point, I was in miserable company, and throwing some Jose Cuervo back like a cowboy was the path that ended the night with the least amount of friction). If you’re hell-bent on getting mule-kicked by the raw shock of ethanol, a shot is a great way to go about it.
And yet, there was something pleasing about grabbing that icy bottle of Jager out of the freezer and watching it pour slow and viscous into the shot glass. And then, GULP, it ices your throat on the way down and seems even more licorice and prune heavy than before.
But surprisingly, the finish was still pretty good. There’s some lingering root beer spice, and if anything, you’re kind of left with a vague disappointment that you at one point had something yummy in front of you, but like a dumb kid you ate it way too fast and now there’s no more of it. It was altogether too easy to quaff that amount of spirit in so short a timespan.
And that’s about when the lightning bolt hit me. I didn’t exactly remember what Jagermeister’s ABV was… from the residual tastes of the shot alone, I’d have probably pegged it at about 20%. I was damn near gobsmacked when I walked back to the freezer to double-check my suspicions and saw that Jagermeister is nearly twice that potent: it’s a 70-proof liqueur.
So now it all makes sense. I think if someone paid me to get as drunk as I could, as fast as possible, without making that “Yucky” face that normally comes with rapidly swallowing hard liquor, Jagermeister would be the ideal delivery vehicle. There’s something about that 70-proof strength that’s also remarkably deceptive. You know your body would fight you if you tried to belt down room-temp Wild Turkey or any variety of Johnnie Walker that fast. But serve something just a little candied at an ice-cold temperature, and it’s real hard for your brain or taste buds to recognize that you’ve just consumed an entire light beer’s worth of alcohol in one single gulp. (I did the math.)
So what did we learn?
Let’s tip our cap to Jagermeister. We have a profoundly old-world product here that, despite its association with fraternity-aged revelers, is actually a rather interesting and deserving amaro. Cocktail and spirit nerds probably should pick up a bottle of this to understand and appreciate what it is and take the time to evaluate it on its own merits. I’ll be seeing how it works in a few cocktails, or maybe just in a Jager and soda.
But after close review, oh boy—I absolutely see how people can get wrecked on this stuff. If ever the “Drink Responsibly” warning was aptly put on a product, it’s this one.
So hats off to Jager for making it this far, and hey: maybe we can thank the party boys for why the rest of us can get an amaro of this quality at a very agreeable price at just about any grocery store in America.
