US National Crème de Menthe Day
<p>In 1885, a pharmacist named Émile Giffard was working in the western French city of Angers, studying the cooling and digestive properties of mint. He had brought peppermint leaves over from England, and he distilled them into a clear, refined liqueur that he served to guests at the nearby Grand Hôtel to relieve them during a stifling summer. He called it Menthe-Pastille, after the popular mint sweets of the day. That liqueur, and the family of mint spirits it helped define, is what 15th September quietly marks in the United States: National Crème de Menthe Day, a date set aside for the sweet, herbaceous spirit that tints a dozen classic cocktails an unmistakable green.</p>
<h2 id="where-the-liqueur-comes-from">Where the liqueur comes from</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>Giffard’s invention turned a pharmacy into a distillery. By 1891 he had acquired premises to expand production, and the Giffard company he founded still makes Menthe-Pastille in Angers today, reportedly using the same Mentha piperita peppermint, the so-called Mitcham variety, that Émile favoured from the start. The Mitcham name itself points to the south London town once renowned for its peppermint fields, the source of the most prized English mint oil of the nineteenth century — so even the plant in the bottle carries the trace of Giffard’s English inspiration. Having proved that Menthe-Pastille could sell, he went on to build a whole catalogue of fruit and botanical liqueurs and syrups, drawing on ingredients that arrived at Angers by ship along the Loire, and the firm remained in family hands for generations. What makes the story worth telling is how ordinary its beginning was: a chemist curious about whether mint really aided digestion, a hot season, and a hotel full of overheated patrons. The medicinal framing was not mere marketing. Mint had a long-standing reputation as a digestive aid, and the after-dinner glass of crème de menthe inherited that role directly.</p>
<p>Crème de menthe is not, despite the name, a cream liqueur. The French word crème here signals a high sugar content and a thick, syrupy body, the same convention that gives us crème de cacao, crème de cassis and crème de violette. There is no dairy in it at all. It is made by steeping or distilling mint, traditionally peppermint or Corsican mint, in neutral spirit and then sweetening heavily. The result comes in two guises that taste essentially identical: the famous bright green, coloured to advertise its character, and a clear “white” version that lets a bartender build a minty drink without staining it.</p>
<h2 id="how-it-earned-its-place-behind-the-bar">How it earned its place behind the bar</h2>
<p>The liqueur’s reign in cocktail culture is tied to a handful of drinks that became fashionable in the first half of the twentieth century. The Stinger, brandy cut with white crème de menthe, was a sharp, fashionable nightcap in 1920s America and appears repeatedly in the fiction and films of the era as the drink of the well-to-do. The Grasshopper, an equal-parts blend of green crème de menthe, crème de cacao and cream, is credited by Tujague’s bar in New Orleans to its owner Philibert Guichet, who reportedly entered it in a 1918 New York cocktail competition and took second place; its grassy colour gave it its name. These two drinks anchored the spirit’s reputation: one austere and bracing, the other dessert in a glass.</p>
<p>Crème de menthe also migrated into the kitchen, where its concentrated mint flavour and brilliant colour suited it to grasshopper pie, mint chocolate sauces, layered ice-cream desserts and the kind of festive, faintly retro confections that appeared at mid-century American dinner parties. The pairing of mint and chocolate, which now feels almost inevitable, owes much of its early cocktail-world expression to crème de menthe blended with crème de cacao.</p>
<p>A clutch of other drinks rounded out its repertoire. The Pousse-Café, a banded column of liqueurs poured slowly so each layer floats on the one below, relied on green crème de menthe’s high sugar density to hold its place in the glass — a bartender’s party trick that doubled as a demonstration of how syrupy the spirit really is. The Green Mist and various crème-de-menthe frappés, served over crushed ice in the manner of a julep, turned it into a hot-weather sipper, returning the liqueur, almost by accident, to the cooling purpose Giffard had originally intended. Through the 1950s and 1960s it was a fixture of the home bar cart, the bottle whose colour did more than any label to signal that the evening had reached its sweet, after-dinner phase.</p>
<h2 id="why-it-still-matters">Why it still matters</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>There is a tidy lesson in the way a regional French digestif became an American observance. Giffard’s liqueur was never meant for cocktails; it was a health tonic dressed up as a treat. Its journey from an Angers hotel bar to the back shelf of every American cocktail lounge is a small case study in how flavours travel and get reinvented far from home. The spirit that an English-trained French chemist made to settle stomachs ended up colouring slushy after-dinner drinks in Havana and New Orleans, and few of the people who ordered them ever thought about mint’s supposed digestive virtues at all.</p>
<p>The day also functions as a stay against forgetting. Crème de menthe spent decades as an object of mild ridicule, shorthand for dated, lurid, overly sweet drinks. The cocktail revival that gathered pace in the 2000s, with its archival interest in pre-Prohibition recipes, rescued it. Bartenders rediscovered that a properly made Stinger is a serious drink and that the green of a Grasshopper is part of its charm rather than an embarrassment.</p>
<p>That rediscovery turned partly on a question of quality rather than fashion. The crème de menthe that earned the spirit its reputation for cloying artificiality was often a cheap, harshly minty, lurid-green product made with synthetic flavouring. Bartenders returning to the classics found that a liqueur built from real distilled peppermint — Giffard’s own Menthe-Pastille chief among them — behaved entirely differently, with a clean, cooling lift rather than a sugary slap. The lesson was that the Stinger and the Grasshopper had never been bad drinks; they had simply been made, for decades, with bad ingredients. Restore the quality of the liqueur and the cocktails snap back into focus, which is why a modern bar menu may now list a Stinger with the same seriousness it gives a Negroni.</p>
<h2 id="how-it-is-marked">How it is marked</h2>
<p>The observance is informal. Cocktail bars that note the date tend to put a Grasshopper or a Stinger on special, and some lean into the retro theme with whole menus of mid-century dessert drinks. Home enthusiasts revisit grasshopper pie and mint-chocolate ice-cream floats. Because the spirit divides opinion so sharply, the day tends to attract the curious and the nostalgic in equal measure, people testing whether a liqueur they remember from a grandparent’s drinks cabinet holds up. It often does, especially the white version, which behaves far more subtly in a glass than its green sibling’s reputation suggests.</p>
<h2 id="a-wider-family-of-sweetened-spirits">A wider family of sweetened spirits</h2>
<p>Crème de menthe is best understood as one member of the broad European tradition of single-flavour sweetened liqueurs, the same lineage that gives a Kir its crème de cassis and a corpse reviver its hints of violet. Anyone drawn to the cool, sweet end of the drinks cabinet on 15th September will find kindred pleasures elsewhere on the calendar. The custard-and-vanilla indulgence of <a href="/specialdate/us-national-pots-de-creme-day/">pots de crème</a> shares the same after-dinner instinct, the same idea that a small, rich, sweet thing is the proper full stop to a meal. And the layered, almond-and-cherry showiness of Italian <a href="/specialdate/us-national-spumoni-day/">spumoni</a> belongs to exactly the colourful, faintly theatrical dessert tradition that crème de menthe garnished for decades.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>The “crème” in crème de menthe refers to sugar, not dairy: these liqueurs are defined in France by a minimum sugar content, and the word never implied cream.</li>
<li>The green and white versions are functionally identical in taste. The colour exists purely so bartenders can choose whether or not to tint the finished drink.</li>
<li>The Grasshopper takes its name from its colour, not any insect ingredient, and is traditionally credited to Tujague’s bar in New Orleans, one of the oldest restaurants in the city.</li>
<li>Émile Giffard’s recipe was inspired by English peppermint sweets, which is why he named the liqueur Menthe-Pastille after the pastilles of the period rather than after the plant.</li>
<li>The Stinger was considered sophisticated enough to feature in high-society circles and Hollywood films of the 1920s and 1930s, a long way from the liqueur’s later reputation as a kitsch relic.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>There is something quietly democratic about a spirit that began as a chemist’s tonic for overheated hotel guests. Crème de menthe never pretended to be rare or aged or difficult; it offered the same cool sweetness to everyone, and it survived being unfashionable because that simplicity is hard to kill. The drinkers who reach for it on 15th September are tasting, whether they know it or not, a direct line back to an Angers summer in 1885, when a man with a still decided that mint might do more than soothe a stomach.</p>
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