The Story Behind Jägermeister | The Well

The Story Behind Jägermeister

Jägermeister is a Kräuterlikör, a German herbal liqueur, made from 56 botanicals macerated in alcohol, aged in oak for about a year, and bottled at 35% ABV. The recipe has been a company secret since 1934, but the brand has confirmed a few of the ingredients over the years: star anise, licorice root, ginger, juniper, saffron, cinnamon, cardamom and citrus peel among them. That is why it tastes the way it does, which is to say like licorice and cough syrup had a very well-made child.

In Germany it is drunk the way it was designed to be drunk: cold, in a small glass, after dinner, as a digestif. In America it became something else entirely.

The liqueur was created by Curt Mast in Wolfenbüttel, in Lower Saxony, and launched in 1935. Mast had inherited his father’s vinegar and wine business and was an avid hunter, which explains the name (Jägermeister means “master hunter,” and was the official title for senior gamekeepers in Germany) and the stag on the label, borrowed from the legend of Saint Hubertus, the patron saint of hunters, who is said to have seen a glowing cross between a stag’s antlers.

For its first four decades Jägermeister was a regional German product with a middle-aged customer base. That changed in 1974, when a New York importer named Sidney Frank noticed it was selling steadily in German-American neighborhoods and secured the US rights. Sales stayed small for another ten years.

Then, in the mid-1980s, for reasons nobody has ever fully explained, it caught on in the bars of Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Frank read a local newspaper story about the trend, flew to Louisiana, and did two things that turned out to matter. He hired a team of brand ambassadors, the Jägerettes, to work the bars in person, a tactic that was almost unheard of at the time and is now standard across the industry. And he ran a deadpan billboard campaign showing a grimacing man mid-sip under the words “so smooth,” which made a joke of the flavor instead of hiding it.

It worked. Jägermeister spread from Louisiana across the American bar scene through the 1990s, helped by the tap machine that serves it at -18°C, the brand’s heavy metal sponsorships, and the Jägerbomb, the shot-in-a-glass-of-energy-drink combination that the company itself has never officially endorsed. Frank went on to create Grey Goose with the money, and Jägermeister went on to become one of the largest-selling liqueur brands in the world, with a record year in 2022. It is still family-owned, still made in Wolfenbüttel, and still, per the label, made with 56 ingredients.

Why I Love Jägermeister

• It is one of the few mass-market spirits that tastes like nothing else on the shelf, and it has never once tried to soften that.
• Poured cold after a big dinner, the way it was designed to be, it is a much better drink than its reputation suggests.

Cheers,
Deena Drewis
Growth & Marketing, Saucey

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