Absinthe

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Absinthe, the anise-flavoured spirit that French writers nicknamed la fée verte, the green fairy, is bottled at somewhere between 45 and 74 percent alcohol by volume. In the United States, that range works out to 90 to 148 proof. Almost nobody drinks it at that strength, because it is normally diluted with water first. For decades, though, governments on several continents treated this herbal spirit as a danger to public order. Doctors blamed it for madness, critics blamed it for crime, and its fans blamed everyone else for misunderstanding it. Was absinthe a hallucinogen, a poison, or a strong drink caught up in a moral panic? Who invented it, who loved it, and who decided it had to go? And what is really in the glass?

  67229199

• 2. From Wormwood To Couvet

  ›

  The Ebers Papyrus, dated to around 1550 BC, mentions wormwood as a remedy in ancient Egypt. The ancient Greeks also used wormwood extracts and wine-soaked wormwood leaves as medicine, and there is some evidence of a wormwood-flavoured wine they called absinthites oinos. Lucretius, in his work De Rerum Natura, describes a wormwood drink given to children as medicine, with honey smeared on the rim of the cup to make it drinkable.

  The Latin word absinthium sits at the root of the spirit's name, and it in turn comes from the Greek apsínthion. Some argue the Greek word means undrinkable. Others point to a Persian root, spand or aspand, which named a plant called Peganum harmala, or Syrian rue. Wormwood was commonly burned as a protective offering, which hints at yet another root meaning to perform a ritual or make an offering. Whether Greek borrowed the word from Persian, or both inherited it from a common ancestor, remains unclear.

  The first evidence of absinthe as a distilled spirit with green anise and fennel dates to the 18th century. According to popular legend, a French doctor named Pierre Ordinaire, living in Couvet, Switzerland, created it around 1792 as an all-purpose patent remedy. The exact date varies by account. Ordinaire's recipe passed to the Henriod sisters of Couvet, who sold it as a medicinal elixir, although some accounts say the sisters were already making it before he arrived.

  In 1797, a certain Major Dubied bought the formula from the sisters. He opened the first absinthe distillery, Dubied Père et Fils, in Couvet, together with his son Marcellin and his son-in-law Henry-Louis Pernod. In 1805, the partners built a second distillery in Pontarlier, France, under the company name Maison Pernod Fils. That brand would stay among the most popular absinthes on the market until 1914.

  1113141291

• 3. The Green Hour

  ›

  During the 1840s, French troops in Algeria were given absinthe as a malaria preventive, and they brought their taste for it back to France. By the 1860s, the bars, bistros, cafés and cabarets of France were so full of drinkers that 5 pm had its own name, l'heure verte, the green hour. The wealthy bourgeoisie, poor artists and ordinary working-class people all drank it. Mass production in the 1880s pushed the price down sharply, and by 1910 the French were drinking about 36 million litres a year.

  Absinthe travelled well. Exports from France and Switzerland carried it to Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States and the Czech Republic, where it found some degree of popularity. Its fashion peaked again in the early 20th century, riding alongside the Art Nouveau and Modernism movements.

  In New Orleans, the Old Absinthe House on Bourbon Street began selling the spirit in the first half of the 19th century. Its Catalan lease-holder, Cayetano Ferrer, renamed the bar the Absinthe Room in 1874, and the drink was served in the Parisian style. Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Aleister Crowley and Frank Sinatra all drank there. The city is also credited as the birthplace of the Sazerac, perhaps the earliest absinthe cocktail.

  The cafés of Paris attracted writers and painters in large numbers. Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec were among the notable drinkers, and so were Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and Lewis Carroll from farther afield. Édouard Manet's first major painting, The Absinthe Drinker, caused controversy and was rejected by the Paris Salon in 1859. Edgar Degas painted L'Absinthe in 1876, and it now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay as a picture of the sodden, benumbed addict. Émile Zola described the drink's effects in his novel L'Assommoir.

  1720212523

• 4. The Louche Ritual

  ›

  In a 19th-century Parisian café, a waiter who took an order for absinthe brought a dose in a glass, sugar, a special spoon and a carafe of iced water. The customer did the rest. Whether to use sugar at all, and how much water to add, was a personal choice.

  The traditional French method starts with a sugar cube resting on a slotted spoon over the glass. Iced water is poured or dripped over the cube until the finished drink holds 1 part absinthe to 3 to 5 parts water. As the water dilutes the spirit, oils from anise, fennel and star anise stop dissolving and cloud the glass. The result is a milky opalescence called the louche, from a French word meaning opaque or shady. Herbal aromas seem to bloom at the same moment, revealing subtleties the neat spirit hides.

  As the drink's popularity grew, so did the equipment. The absinthe fountain was a large jar of iced water with spigots, mounted on a lamp base. It let a drinker prepare several glasses at once, and its hands-free drip left patrons free to talk while the louche formed. Some glasses were designed for the ritual, with a dose line, bulge or bubble in the lower part marking where to stop pouring. One dose ranged from about 2 to 2.5 fluid ounces, or 60 to 75 ml.

  The Czechs are credited with inventing a fiery alternative in the 1990s. Bohemian-style absinth does not louche, which makes the French method useless, so the sugar cube is soaked in spirit, set alight and dropped into the glass. A shot of water then douses the flames. One variant lets the fire burn out on its own and is called cooking the absinthe, or the flaming green fairy. The idea may have been borrowed from Café Brûlot, a coffee and brandy drink served with a burning sugar cube. Experienced absintheurs call it a modern gimmick that spoils the flavour and creates a fire hazard.

  Absinthe also became a cocktail ingredient in the United Kingdom and the United States. By 1930, dozens of fancy cocktails calling for it had appeared in bartender guides. Hemingway contributed Death in the Afternoon to a 1935 collection of celebrity recipes. His instructions read: "Pour one jigger absinthe into a Champagne glass. Add iced Champagne until it attains the proper opalescent milkiness. Drink three to five of these slowly."

  7980772925

• 5. Inside The Bottle

  ›

  Grand wormwood, green anise and Florence fennel are known among makers as the holy trinity of absinthe. Many other herbs may join them, including petite wormwood, hyssop, melissa, star anise, angelica, peppermint, coriander and veronica. Traditional absinthes were redistilled from white grape spirit, known as eau de vie. Lesser versions used alcohol made from grain, beets or potatoes.

  An 1864 book, The English and Australian Cookery Book, preserves an early recipe. It called for four pounds of wormwood tops, an ounce each of angelica root, calamus aromaticus, aniseed and dittany leaves, and four gallons of alcohol. The maker macerated the mixture for eight days, added a little water, distilled it over a gentle fire until two gallons remained, reduced it to proof spirit and finished it with a few drops of aniseed oil.

  Good absinthe follows a method close to that of high-quality gin. Botanicals soak in base alcohol and are then redistilled, which leaves the bitter principles behind. The colourless distillate leaves the alembic at around 72 percent ABV. It can be reduced and bottled clear, or coloured.

  A traditional green comes from chlorophyll, not dye. In a secondary maceration, herbs such as petite wormwood, hyssop and melissa steep in the distillate, giving up their chlorophyll and adding herbal complexity. Because the chlorophyll stays chemically active, it plays a role in ageing similar to that of tannins in wine. Before the bans, many distilleries aged their absinthe in settling tanks before bottling.

  Light and air slowly turn naturally coloured absinthe from green to yellow-green and eventually brown. That shade was once called feuille morte, or dead leaf, and drinkers welcomed it as proof that the colour was natural. Vintage bottles often emerge amber after decades of slow oxidation. Modern makers use dark bottles to preserve the green. A refrigerator or freezer is a poor place to store it, because the anethole may polymerise and leave an irreversible precipitate.

  Many modern absinthes skip distillation altogether. In the cold-mix method, flavouring essences and artificial colouring are simply blended into commercial alcohol, as with cheap flavoured vodkas. Some bohemian-style bottles of this kind reach 89.9 percent ABV. Most countries have no legal definition of absinthe, so a cold-mixed product can be labelled just like a distilled one. Switzerland is the only country with a legal definition, and it permits only distilled absinthe. Home kits that soak herbs in vodka usually yield a harsh imitation, and one documented drinker suffered acute kidney injury after taking 10 ml of pure wormwood oil.

  Styles divide the market further. Nineteenth-century treatises sorted absinthe into grades called ordinaire, demi-fine, fine and Suisse, in rising order of strength and quality. Blanche is the clear style, also called la Bleue in Switzerland. Verte is the green style, made by adding a secondary maceration to a blanche, and it is usually bottled closer to full strength. Spanish absenta often uses Alicante anise and has a citrus note. Hausgemacht is the German term for home-distilled absinthe, made in tiny quantities for personal use. Bohemian-style absinth is best described as a wormwood bitters with little or none of the anise or fennel of the classic spirit. Rose and rouge absinthes, coloured with rose or hibiscus flowers, also exist, yet only one historical brand of rose absinthe has been documented.

  6667606174

• 6. The Case Against

  ›

  One critic wrote that absinthe "makes you crazy and criminal, provokes epilepsy and tuberculosis, and has killed thousands of French people. It makes a ferocious beast of the man, a martyr of the woman, and a degenerate of the infant, it disorganizes and ruins the family and menaces the future of the country." Such language helped turn a fashionable drink into a public enemy.

  The medical case rested heavily on the French psychiatrist Valentin Magnan. In 1864, he exposed one guinea pig to pure wormwood vapour and another to alcohol vapour. Only the wormwood animal suffered convulsive seizures, and he later blamed a compound in wormwood called thujone. Over ten years of experiments with wormwood oil, he studied 250 cases of alcoholism and concluded that absinthe abusers fared worse than other heavy drinkers, with rapid-onset hallucinations. The idea of absinthism, a condition distinct from ordinary alcoholism, grew from this work.

  One modern writer argues that the temperance movement and the wine industry orchestrated fabricated claims and smear campaigns. Fiction played a part too. Marie Corelli's popular 1890 novel, Wormwood: A Drama of Paris, followed a Frenchman driven to murder and ruin after he was introduced to absinthe. She intended it as a morality tale, and it was speculated to have contributed to later bans in Europe and the United States.

  The tipping point came in 1905, when a Swiss farmer named Jean Lanfray murdered his wife and two children and then tried to kill himself. Lanfray had also drunk a lot of wine and brandy that day, but that fact was overlooked, and the blame fell on two glasses of absinthe. A petition collected more than 82,000 signatures calling for a ban. Voters approved it in a referendum on the 5th of July 1908, and the prohibition was written into the Swiss constitution.

  Other countries had moved earlier or followed soon after. The Congo Free State banned absinthe as early as 1898, and Belgium and Brazil acted in 1906. The Netherlands followed in 1909, Switzerland enforced its ban in 1910, and the United States banned it in 1912. France came last of the major bans. Finland prohibited absinthe from 1919 to 1932, Germany enacted a ban on the 27th of March 1923 that even outlawed printed instructions for making it, and Italy's Fascist regime banned anything named Assenzio in 1926 and strengthened the penalties in 1931.

  The bans reshaped the drinks world. In France, they led to the popularity of pastis, and to a lesser extent ouzo, both anise-flavoured spirits without wormwood. After the First World War, Pernod Fils resumed production at the Banus distillery in Catalonia, where absinthe was still legal, but declining sales ended it in the 1960s. Spain and Portugal never banned absinthe, and production and drinking there never stopped. In Switzerland, the ban pushed distillers underground, where they made colourless la Bleue because it was easier to hide from the authorities.

  891093991

• 7. What Science Found

  ›

  After leaving a bar at closing time, an inebriated Oscar Wilde described a phantom feeling of tulips brushing against his legs. It remains one of the best-known written accounts of absinthe drinking. Toulouse-Lautrec and Vincent van Gogh also helped spread the idea that absinthe had powerful psychoactive properties, and many bohemian artists and writers happily embraced the claims of absinthe's opponents.

  A scientific paper in the 1970s revived the notion, suggesting that thujone's structure resembles that of THC, the active chemical in cannabis, and might bind to the same receptors. Counterevidence appeared in 1999. Thujone is a GABA antagonist, and large doses can cause muscle spasms, but no direct evidence links it to hallucinations. Past reports put thujone in absinthe at up to 260 mg/kg. More recent analyses of original absinthes showed that only a trace of the wormwood's thujone survives proper historical distillation. Most traditionally crafted absinthes, vintage and modern, fall within current EU standards.

  Tests on mice used about 45 mg of thujone per kg of body weight, far more absinthe than anyone could realistically drink. The high alcohol content would cause death long before thujone mattered. In documented cases of acute thujone poisoning from swallowing it, the source was not commercial absinthe but other things, such as common essential oils, which may contain as much as 50 percent thujone.

  A study in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol gave volunteers thujone in alcohol. At a high dose of 0.28 mg/kg, reaction time slowed and attention narrowed to the central field of vision. A low dose of 0.028 mg/kg looked no different from plain alcohol. Even so, the subjects could not reliably tell which samples held thujone. For an average 65 kg man, the high dose equals 18.2 mg. At the EU limit of 35 mg/L, he would need about half a litre of high-proof spirit to reach it, a quantity that could produce a potentially lethal blood alcohol level above 0.4 percent.

  The real hazards probably lay in the bottle. Some unscrupulous makers of cheap absinthe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries skipped the natural colouring stage and added toxic copper salts, including cupric acetate, to fake the green tint. Others added antimony trichloride to imitate the louche effect, or used oil of wormwood and impure alcohol that may have carried methanol. These adulterants are the most widely accepted explanation for the hallucinations once blamed on the spirit itself.

  The debate over whether absinthe affects the mind beyond its alcohol has not been settled. The most commonly reported experience is a clear-headed form of drunkenness, sometimes called lucid drunkenness. The chemist, historian and absinthe distiller Ted Breaux has suggested that some herbal compounds in the drink act as stimulants while others act as sedatives, producing an overall lucid effect of awakening. The long-term effects of moderate drinking remain unknown, although the herbs traditionally used are reported to have painkilling and antiparasitic properties.

  9496419581

• 8. Return From Prohibition

  ›

  The British importer BBH Spirits began bringing Hill's Absinth from the Czech Republic into the United Kingdom in the 1990s, and this sparked the modern resurgence. The UK had never formally banned the drink, though it went about 70 years without importing it. The first wave of new bottles came almost exclusively from Czech, Spanish and Portuguese brands of recent origin, mostly in the Bohemian style. Connoisseurs judged them inferior to the 19th-century spirit.

  The real change came from law. On the 27th of September 1991, Germany adopted the European Community's standards of 1988, which effectively re-legalised absinthe there. Italy amended its laws to comply with directive 88/388/EEC in 1992. France adopted the same 1988 regulations but also issued a decree that kept the ban on products labelled absinthe, with strict limits on fenchone from fennel and pinocamphone from hyssop. French producers sidestepped it by labelling their products spiritueux à base de plantes d'absinthe, meaning wormwood-based spirits. A legal challenge to the decree's scientific basis led to its repeal in 2009, and La Fée Absinthe, launched in 2000, had already become the first commercial absinthe distilled and bottled in France since 1914. The French Senate voted to repeal the prohibition in April 2011, and the repeal took effect in May 2011 after petitions from the Fédération Française des Spiritueux.

  In July 2004, an Amsterdam wine seller named Menno Boorsma challenged the Dutch restrictions and confirmed that absinthe was legal again. Belgium lifted its ban on the 1st of January 2005, citing a conflict with single European Market food and beverage rules. Switzerland repealed its constitutional ban in 2000 during an overhaul of the constitution, but wrote the prohibition into ordinary law. That law was later repealed, and absinthe became legal on the 1st of March 2005. The village of Môtiers, in the Val-de-Travers near Neuchâtel, became the centre of production and promotion. Its Maison de l'Absinthe and attached museum occupy the former courthouse where distillers were once prosecuted. In 2014, a Swiss court ruled that absinthe is a type of product and not a label tied to one place, overturning a 2010 decision that had limited the name to the Val-de-Travers.

  The United States lifted its ban in stages. In 2007, the French brand Lucid became the first genuine absinthe to receive a Certificate of Label Approval for American import since 1912. Lucid and Kübler and their lawyers had done most of the work over the years 2004-2007. In December 2007, St. George Absinthe Verte, from St. George Spirits of Alameda, California, became the first American-made absinthe since the ban. Regulators require absinthe to be thujone-free, defined as under 10 parts per million. The word absinthe cannot be the brand name or stand alone on a label, and packaging cannot suggest hallucinogenic effects. Some Americans mark the 5th of March as National Absinthe Day, since it ended a 95-year ban.

  Other countries moved at their own pace. Okanagan Spirits Craft Distillery in British Columbia made Canada's first genuine absinthe, Taboo Absinthe, in 2007. Brazil legalised absinthe in 1999, brought in by the entrepreneur Lalo Zanini, with a national 54 percent cap on spirits. Catalonia has seen a major resurgence since 2007, and Australia dropped its special import permit on the 13th of July 2013. In Mataura, in Southland, New Zealand, the local authority banned it in August 2008 after a 17-year-old was hospitalised with alcohol poisoning from a brand bottled at 89 percent ABV. By the early 21st century, nearly 200 brands were made in a dozen countries, and frozen preparations have joined the traditional styles.

  One prohibition has outlasted all the rest. The Absinthe (Prohibition) Act 1915, passed in the New Hebrides, was never repealed. It appears in the 2006 consolidated legislation of Vanuatu, which still forbids the manufacture, importation and sale of absinthe or similar liquors.

  5350515263