Fernet Branca

Fernet Branca and Branca Menta, these are bitter Italian liqueurs, throwbacks to the late 19th century. As you've likely heard, Coca-Cola, which was created in the 1870s, was initially conceived as a health tonic. It was supposed to cure nervousness, sick stomach, body aches, melancholy, and a host of other ills. To this day, the Coca-Cola formula is a guarded secret, consisting of an assortment of herbs from foreign lands (though it's been almost 100 years since they took the cocaine out of it).

In this way, Fernet Branca is similar. It is a liqueur that consists of alcohol and some 40 herbs, including the currently popular St. John's wort. Branca has long been recommended as hangover cure and I myself can tell you that it works. Branca straight up is intensely bitter and quite medicinal and herbal. I recommend that you drop a shot of it into 8 ounces of any cola, add ice, and drink up. You'll feel terrific in short order. Sure, Fernet Branca is 80 proof, so you are getting a belt of alcohol, but the high is much different from any other alcohol I've tasted. Fernet Branca gives you the sense that life is great (which it is) and that you are robust and healthy- so healthy that you might feel like you would like to go for a twenty mile jog or perhaps rearrange your furniture- alone. Fernet Branca is terrific, a classic that no bar should be without, and I highly endorse it as both a hangover cure and a drink to sip after a hard day at work or when you are out on the town.

The most trustworthy story of Fernet-Branca's creation in 1845 is traced to a home that still sits on a street named Corso di Porta Nuova in Milan. Just before the bloody regional revolt against Austria that unified Italy, self-taught herbalist Bernardino Branca, the great-great-grandfather of Count Niccolo Branca, brewed a new amaro (a bitter digestive liqueur) and, after testing it on his family, went into business selling it with his three sons -- Luigi, Giuseppe, and Stephano -- and Stephano's savvy wife, Maria Scala.

The name "Fernet" itself was invented then, too, an exotic moniker that loosely implies the use of a "clean iron" in the distillation process, which has since been used for knockoffs like Luxardo Fernet Amaropad and Fernet Stock.

The first adverts in local political papers boasted of a "febrifuge, vermifuge, tonic, anti-choleric, warming pick-me-up" that could be mixed with everything from vermouth to animal broth. Scala wisely marketed it to women to ease menstrual discomfort (until 1913, only women were depicted drinking it in advertisements), but it was also lauded to aid digestion, impede nervous irritation, stimulate the appetite, treat troubles of the "splean," cure anxiety, quell stomach aches and headaches, and arrest the effects of old age.

And the lie spread like wildfire. During the period of shaky near-science at the mid-1840s, old Bernardino's secret concoction of herbs and spices -- which was first credited to a fictional long-lived Swede named Dr. Fernet Svedese and later a clandestine sect of friars from a remote alpine hermitage -- became one of the most successful products in pre-unification Italy. During a time when bloodletting was common and antibiotics were unheard-of, Fernet-Branca -- with its peculiar alcohol kick and heady dose of opiates -- was a certain miracle cure. In stark contrast to the draconian warnings of our modern-day surgeons general, it was widely endorsed by doctors. Some even stocked it in their hospitals.

Popularized by clever advertising -- iconic images of Romanesque women, colorful jesters, and the euphoric alligator (an animal famed for its great digestive abilities) -- Fernet went global. At the turn of the century, Italian illustrator Leopoldo Metlicovitz designed the logo that still graces the bottle: a land-and-water globe under an eagle whose talons clutch the miracle bottle, delivering Italy's "gift to the world" to every continent. The drink came to the United States in the suitcases of Italian immigrants, finding a home in the Italian wards of San Francisco, New York City, Baltimore, and Detroit, as well as those throughout Central and South America.

When Prohibition laws were passed in the U.S. in 1919, the myth of Fernet-Branca was a salvation: Imported as a medicine, it was perhaps the only package liquor legally sold in the States. A year before the 18th Amendment was repealed, the demand for Fernet-Branca was so great that the Branca family, then in its fourth generation of ownership, opened an American distillery in New York City's Tribeca. The paperwork of the distillery lists deliveries to more than 40 San Francisco drugstores, most of which were in North Beach.

After enduring blue laws and the Second World War (during which the American distillery was deemed "essential" to the same war effort that bombed the Italian distillery), the popularity of Fernet-Branca soared, with production from the American distillery peaking in 1960, when it produced more than 60,000 cases. With the Drug Regulation Reform Act of 1978, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms took a more investigative sip of the drink and tightened controls on Fernet-Branca, forcing one of the few changes in the recipe in order to bring opiates down to legal levels.

Today Fernet-Branca is 80 proof, with only trace amounts of opiates. Bottles of the earlier opiate-rich brew are rare and can be identified by true Fernet-Branca scholars upon a close examination of the label.

Ferneducator: One who teaches others about Fernet-Branca.

Good at social gatherings, I make people happy. Will make your mind go crazy.

Fernet Cocktail

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