Hpnotiq Is Back?

Once, when my brother was in college, he brought home an aquamarine bottle that he had received as a gift. He doesn’t drink. My parents kept it in the china cabinet in my childhood dining room as though it was a fancy wine they were saving for a special occasion. (It was the only bottle in there; they also don’t really drink.)

That bottle was Hpnotiq. For years, it sat in the cabinet until eventually my family moved out of the country. I remember looking at that silver, swirly, mermaid-coded logo, intrigued. (Aquamarine the movie had also recently come out.) To this day, I’ve never actually tried the stuff. By the time I was in college, we’d moved onto greener (well, at least less blue) pastures, the likes of vodka Red Bulls and White Claws. To write this, I searched my local liquor stores, and I’m sad to report that they did not have Hpnotiq. If not for my weird dining-room associations with the liqueur, I might have never heard of it. That is, maybe, until now?

Last year I learned that there was an Incredible Hulk—a drink from the aughts that combines the liqueur with Cognac—on the menu at No Smoking Bar in LA. That’s random, I thought. I haven’t seen the word Hpnotiq in ages. But then I saw the drink again, at Press Club in D.C. In New York, you can get an Incredible Hulk at Lullaby, in a dainty Nick & Nora, or at Jean’s, where it was recently, inexplicably, poured into an Erewhon-branded jar. You can also get one at the recently opened Kitty’s Cosmopolitan Lounge in Chicago. But why?