In 1903, the French government expelled the Carthusian monks from their monastery in the Alps and seized everything they owned.
The monastery. The distillery. The equipment. All of it. There was just one little problem.
Only two monks in the entire order knew the recipe for Chartreuse, and they had memorized it. There was nothing written down that the government could take.
The French government hired chemists to reverse-engineer it. They analyzed every bottle they could find. They ran every test available to early 20th-century science. They could not replicate it. The liqueur they produced under the Chartreuse name was so inferior that it destroyed the brand almost immediately. Sales collapsed. The company the government set up to produce it went bankrupt in 1929.
The monks, meanwhile, had relocated to Tarragona in Spain and were producing the real thing the entire time.
In 1929, the same year the French government’s operation went under, the monks quietly bought back the rights to their own name and returned to their monastery.
The recipe is still known by exactly two monks at any given time. When one dies or becomes too ill to continue, he passes his portion to a successor. The full recipe has never been written down in a form that has left the order.
Chartreuse is made from 130 Alpine plants and herbs. The monks tend the distillery themselves. They take no outside employees into the production process. The 1605 manuscript that started all of this is still held in the monastery archive.
The French Third Republic lasted from 1870 to 1940.
The monks are still there, still making Chartreuse.
-Donnie
eatshistory.com