BroVo Spirits Uncharted Rhapsody American Forest Liqueur Review

It’s been about a year and a half at this point since I wrote this piece formally acknowledging the seeming shortage and widespread disappearance from the shelves of the indispensable liqueur we know and love as Green Chartreuse. Since then, we’ve learned a few things: The flow of Chartreuse (both green and yellow) hasn’t exactly been disrupted by supply chain issues or lingering effects of the pandemic, but has instead simply reached a point where demand has greatly outstripped supply. In early 2023, the Carthusian monks who produce Chartreuse acknowledged that they decided in 2021 to no longer increase production/supply of Chartreuse. Therefore, as demand has only continued to decrease, the existing bottles are now getting progressively harder to find in many places. This has had the real-time effect of giving rise to many suggested replacements and alternatives, but pretty much none of them have been crafted as specifically for this purpose as BroVo Spirits Uncharted Rhapsody. There are “potential Chartreuse analogues,” and then there’s this–an “American Forest Liqueur” that is about as close as you can conceptually get to the original spirit without just ripping it off.

Here’s the thing about Chartreuse replacements: There’s almost no other longtime products on the market that make a really close comparison, because Chartreuse is so unique and unusual in the first place. A common suggestion such as Dolin Genepy, for instance, is certainly in the same ballpark in the sense that it is also an herbal liqueur, but can you really compare a 90 proof spirit (which is plenty strong) to the 110 proof combination of intensity and complexity that exists in Green Chartreuse? That’s why BroVo Spirits’ product is immediately of note: It was crafted from the ground up to serve this purpose, in partnership with a pair of high-profile Chicago bartenders, Micah Melton and Chad Hauge. They joined the Woodinville, Washington company in making this fiendishly complex tribute to the alpine liqueur category, influenced by the Pacific Northwest. This is right in the wheelhouse for BroVo, a company that specializes in amaro and liqueurs such as falernum.

The result was Uncharted Rhapsody American Forest Liqueur, which BroVo Spirits founder Mhairi Voelsgen calls the most complex product the company has ever crafted. More than a decade of development is represented in its creation, which likewise involved trips to Europe to study methods used by monastic distillers. As Voelsgen puts it: “The complexity of process is an amplification of our existing processes. Generally you can think of vodka as a 5 step process, amaro as a 50 step process–by comparison this is a 500 step process. It is exceptionally complicated. We determined early that it was critical to match ABV, BRIX and acid. So when you mix with Uncharted, you don’t need to offset with anything else. The flavor is between genepi and Green Chartreuse, with a PNW feel. But in a cocktail, we believe it is VERY similar. While it is not an exact match, because our goal is not to ‘paint the masters’ as an art historian would say, it is a direct substitute for Green Chartreuse. Our goal was to be the best Green Chartreuse substitute available.”

There is, of course, a degree of mystery involved in the wide variety of ingredients–Chartreuse famously boasts more than 130 ingredients involved. Uncharted Rhapsody has more than 50, with the company saying in particular that “there’s more than $5 worth of genepi in ever bottle.” And importantly, it is bottled at the same 55% ABV (110 proof) as the original Green Chartreuse, meaning that this is begging to be substituted in to classic cocktails such as The Last Word.