Americans, you have no idea: Zwack is here. Brace yourselves.

What is Zwack, you say?

[Thunderclaps. Doors slamming. Locks bolting. Distant screams, and the lights flicker.]

Half-drunk Zwack: a philosophical impossibility (thanks, Wikimedia)

Zwack—or Unicum, as it’s called in its native Hungary; you can see why they changed the name, I guess—is about the nastiest liquor I’ve ever had the pleasure of drinking. And that includes the rot-gut framboise and the Sombrero Negro tequila my college roommate inherited from her father, from his college days. It is black as tar and viciously strong, and tastes like all the things that prompt your mother to say, “Shush—it’s good for you.”

And thanks to Borat, it’s now being marketed with a faux-bad-English booklet that suggests things like mixing it with energy drink (the so-called “Zwack Attack”).

This I learned from Aaron, who’d just been to a Zwack tasting at Astor Wines. He went for that perverse kind of nostalgia, the kind that makes you long for things you once hated.

See, Aaron and I came to know it when we lived in Cairo. The cheapest flights back to the States were on Malev, which meant a plane change in Budapest and a browse in the duty-free there.

While we lived in Cairo, duty-free liquor–and especially bargains in duty-free–became a near obsession. Cairo is not dry, by any means–people drink their damn-fool heads off. But you can’t just pop down to the liquor store and buy a bottle of whiskey–or a trustworthy bottle, one that won’t make you go blind, anyway. Only after reading The Yacoubian Building (worst. translation. ever., by the way) this year did I realize that the depressed Greek guy whose shop was stocked with nothing but Kleenex was actually a moonshine vendor. So back in the days I lived there, you had to make the most of your duty-free allotment.

Helpfully, you were allowed to use your allotment at a designated booze-and-cigarette joint in Cairo, within a month of your arrival–which meant that whenever you had foreign visitors, you immediately dragged them to the shop to buy the four bottles of booze allowed.

The place stocked the major international brands, but there was also a weird bottom shelf of orphan bottles. They all looked like they’d been retrieved from the cargo hold of a freighter that had sunk in the Suez Canal in 1964–their labels, many in Cyrillic were peeleing off, and they were the most ridiculous shapes. (What is it about weird-shaped booze bottles? The crazier they get, the more disgusting the stuff inside, it seems.) But of course these were the cheap bottles, which is how we ended up with some 30-year-old crème-de-mystery-herbs alongside our Unicum.

At Aaron’s, the Unicum sat there on the sideboard like a black hole of hooch. People would drink room-temperature vermouth before they’d crack the lid on that squat little bottle–its red-and-white cross made you think of first aid, for good reason. At the end of the year, we had a massive party, with everyone contributing all the stray bottles they’d collected at duty-free over the years. Every one of the 50 or so bottles on the sideboard was emptied…except for the Unicum.

So. Now you see my trepidation at the arrival of Zwack in the New World. It could well become the next Jagermeister, but, like legwarmers and jumpsuits, that’s a trend I can’t bring myself to follow.

Aaron was a little more open-minded–the tasting at the wine store seemed to have softened him a little. “Turns out you’re supposed to drink it chilled,” was all he said.