This Hawaiian comes from Thad Vogler, the San Francisco bartender behind Bar Agricole and Trou Normand, who has poured it for roughly a decade — first at Trou Normand, a Calvados-focused bar, and later at Bar Agricole's pop-up residency at Quince in 2024. Vogler is real and well documented (Punch magazine profiled the drink directly), but the recipe's own origin is genuinely uncertain: Vogler has said he found it years ago while researching apple-brandy drinks and can no longer locate where — "either I just, in a gray-out, slid [the Chartreuse] in at some point, or it's in a book somewhere." What's clear is the lineage of similar drinks around it: Harry Johnson's Brandy Fix from around 1900 paired green Chartreuse with pineapple syrup, and an Applejack Sour recipe from the 1941 book Here's How combined applejack, lemon, and pineapple. This Hawaiian sits in that family without being provably any single one of them.
A long-lost pineapple-and-Chartreuse sour, with a velvety, lush texture and a continental-meets-tropical flavor profile.
PunchFound, Not Invented
Vogler's own account is unusually candid for a bartender talking about a signature drink: he isn't claiming to have invented it, and he's upfront that he can't pin down where he first saw the combination of Calvados, yellow Chartreuse, and pineapple. That honesty is worth preserving rather than smoothing over into a cleaner origin story.
The related, better-documented drinks — Johnson's Brandy Fix and the 1941 Applejack Sour — establish that apple brandy plus pineapple plus an herbal or citrus element is a real, decades-old combination, even if this exact recipe under this exact name can't be traced past Vogler's own bars.
The Spec
Calvados for backbone, yellow Chartreuse for herbal sweetness, fresh lime for acid, and pineapple syrup standing in for the housemade pineapple gum syrup Vogler originally used — a fussier, longer-lasting prep most home bars will skip in favor of a good commercial pineapple syrup.
Why Calvados, not a generic apple brandy
Calvados brings orchard-fruit depth and a faint funk that a neutral applejack doesn't have. A good bonded applejack is a fair substitute, but it drinks drier and less rounded — worth trying both to hear the difference.
Yellow, not green, Chartreuse
Yellow Chartreuse is lower-proof and softer than the green, letting the Calvados stay in front instead of getting steamrolled by the herbal intensity green Chartreuse brings to a drink like the Last Word.
Bottom Line
An honestly-sourced drink from an honest bartender: real credit to a real, working bar professional, paired with an admission that the recipe's deeper history is lost. Served simply — shaken, strained, unadorned — it doesn't need a story to be worth making.