Jägermeister Is Good, Actually, and You Can Use It to Make a Frozen Margarita.

A very weird, very delicious Margarita variation featuring the hard-charging German party booze.

Over the past several weeks, we’ve looked at an array of bittered sours. 

There was the Fitzgerald, a classic gin sour with a few added dashes of bitters. 

There was the Pisco Sour, an eggy cocktail made with assertive fruit brandy — and dotted with bitters on the top. 

And then there were a couple of bitter honey Daiquiris, including the Beehive, which slotted a bit of ultra bitter Fernet Branca into the base of the cocktail. 

The goal with each of these drinks was to demonstrate something about how bitter elements work in cocktails, especially in light, bright summer sours. 

For this week’s newsletter, I want to take the bitter-summer-sour concept one step further with a Margarita riff made with an amaro base — specifically Jägermeister. 

The drink is called the Jägerita, and it’s frankly one of the weirder recipes I’ve ever encountered: a frozen, blended Margarita with no tequila, no mezcal, no traditional base spirit of any kind. Instead, it’s built on a full pour of spicy, herbal German party booze. 

It’s a fun drink, and arguably even a funny drink — a sort of joke in cocktail form. You’re going to make a Margarita with Jägermeister? The stuff we used to do shots of in our misspent youth? The booze served from the little chilled shot dispenser on the bar? Haha, sure, ha, right, yes, you must be kid…ding. Wai…wait. Really??!!!! Dude. Wut.

Yes, really. Dude.

That reaction is actually understandable. The brand has historically courted the perception of Jägermeister as a hedonistic party booze that may have special intoxicating powers. In some ways, however, that perception has been to the detriment of its actual uses as a delicious and unusual cocktail ingredient. 

To combat that perception, we’re going to make a frozen Jägerita. Conveniently, this cocktail is also fairly easy to make, warm-weather friendly, and surprisingly tasty.

In addition, this recipe works as a multi-purpose template. So if you don’t like Jägermeister or don’t have a bottle on hand, you can probably make a version with something that’s already on your bar cart. You can learn to use Jägermeister. But you don’t have to be hemmed in by it.

Naturally, we will also be making an alternative version with Cynar. What else did you expect? 

‘Liquid Valium’ and the Creation of the Jägermeister Legend

Most people probably do not think of Jägermeister as an amaro. Unlike most well-known amari, it’s of German origin, not Italian, and in contrast to the classy and sophisticated brand profile of, say, Campari¹, its reputation is as a vehicle for hard-charging boozy excess. 

Even amongst aficionados, it sometimes gets overlooked: As far as I can tell, Matteo Zed’s wide-ranging and excellent amaro reference guide, The Big Book of Amaro, does not contain a single reference to the bottle. 

But this reputational difference is as much a product of branding and marketing as anything else, and it helps to move past the sometimes salacious marketing that has historically defined the brand.