What New Orleanians do know is that Ojen has been hard to find—until recently, when it was resurrected by the Sazerac Company.

* * *

Ojen is an obscure ingredient that most people have never heard of, even in New Orleans. Hailed as the “preferred cocktail of the Rex ruling class,” the Ojen Cocktail is, or was, a bougie drink, one for the crustiest of the upper crust of New Orleans.

It became widely popular in the late 1940s, when Brennan’s, a well-to-do Royal Street restaurant, opened in the French Quarter. They featured the Ojen Frappé—a fancy term for a cocktail over shaved ice—as a brunch menu item, marketed as “the absinthe preference of the Spanish aristocracy.”

But by the time the Ojen Frappé was introduced at Brennan’s, Ojen had already been a New Orleans staple for decades. In 1874, a young businessman named Paul Gelpi and his brother Oscar opened a liquor distribution company specializing in imported wines and spirits. Between May and June of 1883, the Gelpi brothers ran a series of advertisements for Ojen. It read, in part, “Superior to ABSINTHE as an Appetizer and Tonic.”

Describing Ojen as “superior to absinthe” was a savvy move. Like absinthe, Ojen was first used as a tonic for medicinal purposes. Southerners, Northerners, and foreign tourists alike made pilgrimages to the former French colony of New Orleans to imbibe the Absinthe House’s “Parisian style” of dripped absinthe at the corner of Bourbon and Bienville. Not only did Gelpi advertise during the height of tourist season, but claiming that Ojen is superior to absinthe invokes New Orleans’s sophisticated European past. It connotes the authenticity and bourgeois refinement for which the city was renowned.

As a prominent and successful citizen, Paul Gelpi served as a board member in a number of the city’s powerful and influential organizations, including an elite gentlemen’s club, the Boston Club. The Boston, as it was known, was influential in the founding of the Krewe of Rex, one of the oldest Carnival organizations in New Orleans. On an uncharacteristically warm February day in 1886, Gelpi was inaugurated as a member, and it was at the Boston Club that the Ojen Cocktail was first mixed by adding two dashes of Peychaud’s bitters and soda water over cracked ice. By the early 1900s, the Ojen Cocktail had become the Boston’s most popular drink.

* * *

In the early 20th century, the Ojen Cocktail made its way out of the Boston Club and onto banquet and cocktail menus, recipe snippets, and printed advertisements. It was served at elite cocktail parties and events through the 1910s, including the annual banquets of the Louisiana Bar Association and the Louisiana Engineering Society. Absinthe was banned in 1912 after the Temperance movement successfully lobbied for a number of legislative measures designed to curb alcohol consumption, so New Orleanians looked for other anise-based alternatives like Pernod, L.E. Jung’s Greenopal, and Herbsaint, which rose to popularity during this period. New Orleans generally preferred Ojen, though, and during the pre-Prohibition period extravagant stories teeming with inebriated tourists drinking Ojen circulated around the country. In a 1919 issue of The Photo-Engraver’s Bulletin, one visitor recounted waiting for his colleague, E.C. Miller, at the train station. When Miller didn’t show, the visitor went to his hotel to find that he had already checked in:

“On arriving at the hotel they discovered that his High Nibs had registered. After locating his room this Committee was received [...] in Miller's room. Miller was in the bath-tub with a Sazerac cocktail in one hand, a Ramos gin fizz in the other, and a[n] Ojen cocktail in his shaving cup. He seemed to become acclimated almost immediately.”

A few months later, the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act brought a prompt end to such tales. Anticipating financial ruin when it became clear that Prohibition would not be repealed immediately, the Gelpis left the liquor industry and went into candy-making. Less than a year later in 1920, Paul Gelpi passed away at the age of 72. In an unsuccessful attempt to revitalize his father’s liquor dynasty after the repeal of Prohibition in the mid 1930s, Paul’s son, Vivian, would wax romantic about his grandfather sailing heroically into the port of New Orleans on a clipper ship from Barcelona, a hull filled to the brim with rare and coveted wines.*