Chicago produces a...technically non-toxic liquid called Jeppson's Malört. If you don't know what this is, The Ringer explains:
The first thing you should know about Malört is that, well, it’s bad. A Google search for it will direct you to the term “Malört face,” a query that will lead to a close-up montage of poor souls reacting to their first taste of the amber liquor: eyes closed, noses scrunched, jaws clenched, veins swelling out of foreheads, perhaps a tear trickling down a cheek in horror or disgust. This is pretty much the point.
For 85 years, Jeppson’s Malört has been a Chicago institution, one that has remained basically unchanged since Prohibition. It’s compared to absinthe, which shares its wormwood core, and to aquavit, which shares its Scandinavian lineage, but Malört isn’t like anything. Describing its flavor profile is a favorite parlor game among those who’ve sampled it. It tastes like earwax or a hornet’s nest or paint thinner or anger; in the words of the back label on the bottle, it is “bitter,” “unusual,” “full-bodied,” and “savored by two-fisted drinkers.” Its following in Chicago has all a cult’s hallmarks: an initiation ritual (see: the Malört face, frequently snarled by visitors who’ve trusted a Chicagoan to order for them), a secret handshake (the so-called Chicago handshake: a shot of Malört and an Old Style), and more than a few tattoos inked across diehards’ flesh. Malört is many things: a Midwestern tradition, a temperance loophole, and a passion project that became a life’s work that could become, maybe, a national phenomenon.
Malört came to the company by way of a Swedish immigrant named Carl Jeppson, who’d arrived in Chicago in the late 1800s from Ystad, a city in the country’s south. He’d fashioned Malört after the bitter spirits of Sweden and started selling the stuff as something of a cure-all—the word “malört” is Swedish for wormwood, sometimes used in digestifs out of a belief that the herb settles the stomach. This may have helped Jeppson skirt Prohibition: Legend holds that he was fond of offering suspicious, bootlegger-hunting Feds a taste of his wares, after which they could only conclude that no one would dare drink it recreationally. The exact details are murky, but sometime in the mid-1930s, shortly after Prohibition ended, Jeppson sold the recipe to Bielzoff, which carried on making it.
As a native Chicagoan, I have, of course, had some. And I can't recommend trying some too much.