Long regarded as the liqueur of choice for an older generation, Chartreuse became a favorite of bartenders in the know during the craft cocktail movement of the early 2000s, favored as much for the romance of its origin story — the recipe, entrusted to the monks in 1605, comes from an ancient manuscript on the “Elixir of Long Life” — as for its bittersweet profile and notes of anise, tarragon and fennel. According to Chartreuse Diffusion, the business arm of the monks’ operation, it took more than 150 years for the Carthusians to “unravel the secret of the manuscript.”

Chartreuse became “a mixologist’s ace in the hole,” said Joe Kakos, an owner of Kakos Market, a liquor store in Birmingham, Mich. Many credit Murray Stenson, a bartender at the Zig Zag Café in Seattle, with repopularizing the liqueur in 2003 when he resurrected the century-old Last Word cocktail, a mixture of gin, Chartreuse, lime juice and maraschino liqueur.

“I almost feel a little bit guilty,” said Ben Dougherty, the cafe’s owner.

In 2020, as the pandemic turned many people into at-home mixologists, sales of Chartreuse in the United States doubled, a pattern that held true worldwide, according to Chartreuse Diffusion. Global sales topped $30 million in 2022.

This rise in popularity directly conflicted with a collective decision that the monks quietly made in 2019 to cap production of their ingredient-intensive spirit in order to limit the environmental impact and to focus on their “primary goal” of solitude and prayer, as explained in a letter released in January.