I first met Derek in 2014 when I hired him to make custom cocktails for a client of ours (a national alcohol brand). I had never met him before, but his reputation reached me before he did. People spoke about his work with the kind of awe usually reserved for artists or musicians.

What struck me then, and still does now, is how he makes every experience feel intentional. From foraging ingredients to designing flavor profiles to crafting the story behind a drink, Derek builds something that lingers. Anytime I bring friends or family to the places he runs, they leave a little stunned by the attention to detail, the warmth of the service, and the sheer creativity he brings to the bar.

When I began Huge Fan, I thought about the people I have met over the years who embody the spirit of fandom in their own ways. Derek came to mind instantly. He is always tinkering, always experimenting, always chasing the next idea. Many years ago I tried one of those experiments: a liqueur he eventually named Elusive. At first glance, it looks like the work of someone obsessed with recreating a centuries-old bottle of Green Chartreuse. But as I learned through our conversation, it is more than that. Elusive is part homage, part act of preservation, and part offering to the community he serves.

This is a story about remixing, scarcity, and community. It is about what happens when devotion meets limitation, and how a fan’s impulse to copy something can end up creating a gift for everyone else.

Green Chartreuse has been around since 1605. The Carthusian monks who make it live in near silence, grow their own herbs, and allow only two at a time to hold the recipe. They aren’t allowed to travel together in case something happens and the recipe gets lost forever. And then once a year, one monk tastes the batch. The recipe is said to hold 130 botanicals, handed down from an alchemist as “the elixir of long life.” It has survived revolutions, exile, and centuries of devotion. Fun fact: the color is named after this elixir. Not the other way around.

Chartreuse has always been a paradox: famous yet fiercely hidden, global yet rooted in a monastery garden. And in recent years, it became elusive in a new way. Starting around 2019, demand for cocktails like The Last Word spiked. Distributors ran dry. Bars scrambled. Stories spread that the monks had decided to cut production. The truth was more complicated. They had not made less, they had simply refused to make more.

There are supposedly two reasons. They wanted to preserve their monastic lifestyle, a life of prayer and silence rather than scaling. But there was also an ecological reason. For centuries, the monks had cultivated gardens in the French Alps. To increase production meant taking more than the earth could provide. To honor their land, they chose restraint.

That refusal only deepened Chartreuse’s mystery. Scarcity often fuels fandom. Studies of fan culture show that when material is difficult to access, participation actually increases. Platforms like Archive of Our Own, which now hosts more than 11 million fan works, were built on this same principle of filling gaps when the original is unavailable or unable to go where they’d like it to go. Chartreuse has always carried a mystery, but the shortage transformed it into something closer to legend. It is not just a bottle; it is ritual, labor, and lore. That orbit is strong.

But for Derek, that orbit actually narrows to one drink: The Last Word. Equal parts gin, green Chartreuse, Luxardo maraschino, and lime.

He loves Chartreuse, yes. But he loves The Last Word more. “If I’m a huge fan of anything, I’m a huge fan of The Last Word more than I’m a huge fan of Green Chartreuse,” he told me.

That feels like a very familiar fan move. You might love a franchise, but really it’s one actor’s portrayal that stays with you. You might call yourself a Swiftie, but you return most often to three songs on Lover that carried you through a hard year. Fandom attaches to specifics. To versions. To the channels that make something personal.

So when The Last Word was suddenly at risk due to Chartreuse bottles growing scarce, Derek didn’t move on. He obsessed.

To continue making his favorite cocktail (for himself and for his customers), he decided to try to make something that could be a stand-in. He stayed overnight at the distillery, sometimes until sunrise, testing techniques and steeping herbs until he found a balance that could hold the cocktail together. He called it “that weird thing where you get too passionate about something.”

But this is what fans do. They copy, they remix, they reinterpret. Fan fiction. Cosplay. Remix culture. When the original is unavailable or missing or quiet or not quite hitting the mark, fans rebuild it in their own image and through their own POV. It is not theft, it is devotion. It is keeping something alive when the official channel closes.

Derek is clear about this: most spirits can be swapped. If Campari disappeared, you could build a Negroni with Aperol. If Fernet-Branca went away, there are cousins that could fill in. But Chartreuse is different. He cannot think of another liqueur that carries such an irreplaceable quality. “There’s absolutely nothing. If any of them would have existed, I would have never made this,” he told me.

That recognition is what makes Elusive less a copy and more an act of stewardship. Around 40 botanicals instead of 130. Mint, thyme, mace, cinnamon, rosemary, clove, even Eastern hemlock and hyssop. A recipe built not to replace Chartreuse, but to preserve the possibility of The Last Word existing at all. The monks might guard their secret, but Derek opens his recipe to peers, eager to share. Where Chartreuse is gatekeeping, Elusive is gift-giving.

Elusive was never meant to be bottled. It began as a necessity: a way to keep serving The Last Word to guests when Chartreuse disappeared from shelves. But now, Derek sees it as the most rewarding project of his career. Not because it is about him, but because it offers something back.

There are the guests who know what Green Chartreuse is, who recognize immediately what Elusive is channeling. For them, it becomes a conversation about legacy, scarcity, and the impossible task of recreating the original. And then there are the guests who do not know the story. With them, Derek starts with flavor. He offers it in a cocktail, often The Last Word, and lets the drink explain itself. “There’s a lot going on there,” people will say, and he smiles. That is the point.

The bourbon crowd has taken to it, too, enjoying its depth and herbal complexity. But the best reactions come from fellow bartenders. These are the people who have struggled to keep The Last Word or a Naked and Famous on the menu because Green Chartreuse had pushed the price sky-high. At one bar in town, the cocktail cost twenty-three dollars. Derek wants Elusive to change that math. “I want it to be a part of a community who haven’t been able to serve The Last Word reasonably,” he told me.

That sense of community shapes his philosophy. When he first started using it in drinks, he would show customers a card with thirty-six of the ingredients listed. At this point in our interview, I laughed at the idea of someone actually trying to make it themselves. After all, it took him years of trial and error, multiple macerations, sous vide infusions, tinctures, careful balancing of dried and fresh botanicals, and a long process of clarification to keep it from looking like muddy water. “People won’t make it,” he said. “And if they did, I’d love it.”

To him, transparency is not a threat. It is authenticity. “Keepin’ it real is my go-to phrase,” he added. Where some distillers might cling to secrecy, Derek enjoys seeing others riff on his cocktails, just as he once riffed on someone else’s.

Chartreuse may remain a mystery. Elusive is not. It is a fan’s creation that turned into a communal resource, proof that the act of copying can become its own kind of gift.

Get your own bottle here.