The Herbsaint Scholar

I first encountered Jay Hendrickson at the 2009 Tales of the Cocktail where he was a speaker at a panel about New Orleans pharmacists who had had an impact on the cocktail world. He was speaking about pharmacist J. Marion Legendre, the man who invented Herbsaint. When he took the stage, he reminded me, with his unironic moustache and limp brown hair and glasses, of the drummer from Cheap Trick, and he spoke in an unrelenting and very soft monotone that made me wonder how he had ever been allowed behind a lectern. Yet he knew everything about Herbsaint and a lot more besides. Plus, he had an amazing collection of old bottles and liquors. I thought, who is this guy?

I found out when Imbibe gave me the opportunity to profile Hendrickson. And the story was worth uncovering. It's published in the March/April issue. Here it is:

The Informant

By Robert Simonson

In 2005, Stanley Schwam was invited to speak on a panel about bitters at Tales of the Cocktail, the tippling convention that takes place in New Orleans every July. He knew something about the subject. For 40 years, he worked for the Sazerac Company, which purchased Peychaud’s Bitters decades ago. At the end of the seminar, Schwam was approached by an unassuming-looking man with lank brown hair, plain moustache and oval-shaped glasses. “Ever seen one of these?” he asked, pulling out an old bottle of Herbsaint. Of course Schwam had. Sazerac had owned the anise-flavored liqueur since 1949. Then he did a double take—the date on the vessel was 1934, the year Herbsaint was introduced. “Where did you get that bottle?” he asked.

Jay Hendrickson, the mystery man in the moustache, had found it on eBay. It’s just one of his many Herbsaint keepsakes. He also owns Herbsaint bottles from the 1940s and ’50s, miniature and full-size; Herbsaint recipe booklets and old labels; bottles from the Prohibition-era drug store owned by J. Marion Legendre, the man who invented the popular absinthe substitute; examples of long-discontinued Herbsaint relatives like Legendre Anisette and Legendre New Orleans Bitters; even the original, pre-Herbsaint Legendre Absinthe. “He’s got a lot of things we don’t have,” admits Kevin Richards, Herbsaint’s brand manager. “The best we can do is scour eBay to try to get our hands on our own.”