The bartender sets a glass of thick, tawny red liquid in front of me. At the bottom is a heap of dark pellets; were the bar lighter and my brain less addled, I would immediately identify them as raisins. After inhaling the fumes, I throw back a mouthful, and the hot drink burns the back of my throat, warms my stomach, and starts my head spinning. The sweetness that comes after the liquor’s bite lures me into another swallow. I’ve never had another drink like it: my first “glogg.”
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In the absence of any familial preparation, I am forced to turn to strangers: specifically, the glogg drinker next to me, who will identify himself only as Jack. Seated on bar stools at Antlers, 5316 N. Clark, we’re smack in the middle of Andersonville, a neighborhood that was once primarily Swedish.
In the old days, Jack tells me, there used to be a pot of glogg simmering on every stove in the neighborhood. These days, glogg makers are few and far between, and they’re a tight-lipped bunch. “You know Mike Royko’s barbecue thing?” he asks. “Glogg makers are like that [about their recipes].”
Carlsen disagrees; he says that even his different batches don’t always taste the same, and that the flavor of most glogg changes over time, “like spaghetti sauce.”
Carlsen and Heitler shun both the commercial varieties carried by German and Scandinavian delis during the Christmas season and the spice packets sold by a few liquor stores throughout the winter. Carlsen says liquor store glogg is as awful as packaged Manhattans; one reason glogg has never caught on among bar owners, he says, is that the good stuff is homemade, and homemade is expensive, costing the glogg maker about $7-$8 a liter.
My glass is empty, but the raisins that had been sitting at the bottom are loaded. One by one, in an unsophisticated, some might even say drunken manner, I pry them out and devour them.
