According to Chartreuse Diffusion, the business arm of the monks’ operation, it took more than 150 years for the Carthusians to “unravel the secret of the manuscript.”Chartreuse became “a mixologist’s ace in the hole,” said Joe Kakos, an owner of Kakos Market, a liquor store in Birmingham, Mich. Many credit Murray Stenson, a bartender at the Zig Zag Café in Seattle, with repopularizing the liqueur in 2003 when he resurrected the century-old Last Word cocktail, a mixture of gin, Chartreuse, lime juice and maraschino liqueur. “I almost feel a little bit guilty,” said Ben Dougherty, the cafe’s owner. In 2020, as the pandemic turned many people into at-home mixologists, sales of Chartreuse in the United States doubled, a pattern that held true worldwide, according to Chartreuse Diffusion. Global sales topped $30 million in 2022.

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