{"id":2553,"date":"2015-05-19T23:49:05","date_gmt":"2015-05-20T05:49:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/?p=2553"},"modified":"2015-05-21T23:31:18","modified_gmt":"2015-05-22T05:31:18","slug":"jaegermeister-torched-in-a-fireball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/jaegermeister-torched-in-a-fireball\/","title":{"rendered":"Torched in a Fireball, Jaegermeister Plots a Comeback (Updated)"},"content":{"rendered":"

“56 Parts. Best as One.” <\/a>That’s Jaeger’s new pitch, introduced in an ad campaign launched in March.\u00a0 The idea, it seems, is to move away from younger shot drinkers (who now prefer Fireball anyway) and emphasize flavor, ingredients and craftsmanship.\u00a0 In other words, sell Jaeger to artisanal fans who would otherwise never dream of buying Jaeger<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Jaegermeister has been around for decades, but\u00a0until the 1980s was barely known outside of Germany, where it was sold as an after-dinner digestive aid.\u00a0 Then a U.S. booze importer and visionary named Sidney Frank <\/a>bought the U.S. importing rights to Jaeger on a hunch.\u00a0At first\u00a0Frank didn’t know how to market it (see the ad pictured with this post). \u00a0But the\u00a0drink was so new (to Americans) and so strange, with 56 secret ingredients, that odd rumors<\/a> about it kept popping up:\u00a0 that\u00a0it\u00a0was made with deer’s blood, or opiates, or\u00a0aphrodisiacs.\u00a0\u00a0Even Jaeger’s weird, medicine-y taste made it alluring.\u00a0 Enticed by\u00a0the mystery, hard-partiers adopted it as their shot of choice.<\/p>\n

Until now.\u00a0 Fireball’s popularity seems as bizarre as Jaeger’s, but the fact it’s about $6 cheaper may have something to do with it.\u00a0 Fireball officially dethroned Jaeger as America’s shot king\u00a0last year, and inspired fiery knockoffs from Jack Daniel’s and Jim Beam.\u00a0 Jaeger still has its fans (such as the young man in Pennsylvania who bit his mother<\/a> when she poured his Jaegermeister down the sink) but clearly Jaeger as a party shot is in eclipse.<\/p>\n

Thus the “56 Parts” angle<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe great thing for us is we have a lot of stories of craftsmanship to tell,\u201d said Marcus Thieme, regional director for North America J\u00e4germeister.<\/p>\n

And while J\u00e4germeister debuted a line extension in 2013 that was a vanilla and cinnamon blend, the company says it won\u2019t launch new flavors simply to follow the next hot trend.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery day there is a new brand coming to the market, we don\u2019t see it as a threat,\u201d Thieme said. \u201cWe aren\u2019t concentrating on what other brands are doing. It is better to drink J\u00e4germeister than anything else.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, we’ll see how it works out.\u00a0 Jaegermeister completely re-invented itself once before, with unimaginable success; maybe a return to its roots isn’t that far-fetched.<\/p>\n

UPDATE:\u00a0 Several readers on Facebook noted that the man pictured in the ad above is Klaus Nomi, a German-born performance artist who\u00a0moved to\u00a0New York and died of AIDS in 1983.\u00a0 Nomi wasn’t just dressing up to play a part, that really was his look<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Some other interesting images from the same Jaegermeister ad campaign that ran in\u00a0New York<\/em> magazine in the late 1970s\/early 80s:<\/p>\n

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“56 Parts. Best as One.” That’s Jaeger’s new pitch, introduced in an ad campaign launched in March.\u00a0 The idea, it seems, is to move away from younger shot drinkers (who now prefer Fireball anyway) and emphasize flavor, ingredients and craftsmanship.\u00a0 In other words, sell Jaeger to artisanal fans who would otherwise never dream of buying […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101,"featured_media":2554,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[200,746,146,143,73,60,481,744,745,747],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2553"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}