STN: The green goddess

A windy and chilly evening found a friend and myself desperately searching for a backup bar after our first choice--with an excellent choice of whiskeys to fit my friend's preferences--was found to be full of diners on a Tuesday evening. I, as they say, knew of a place, but I, alas, also knew their whiskey/whisky selection was severely limited. But, what is this? Their list of absinthe offers as many choices as their bourbon, scotch, rye and Irish combined? Well, new territory awaited and on I went.

It was my first time getting served absinthe in the proper way at a bar, and, for those that have not experienced it, there is no better way to become the talk of the bar. Not only was it my first experience, but my bartender was being schooled by another through the process of serving it properly--which made it an educational experience all 'round. First the bottle comes down off a high shelf. As I examine the label, the bartenders prepare an absinthe fountain filling a medium-sized and moderately ornate glass urn with four spigots (for those times there is an absinthe rush or absinthe happy hour, I suppose) with ice water. Then a small cocktail glass is a filled a bit too highly with the stark greenly colored absinthe, an again moderately-ornate slotted spoon placed on top of the glass and a sugar cube placed on top. By now, I've conversed with everyone within about four seats of me and my friend. Then the glass is lined up for the sugar water torture as the slow drips of water dissolve the sugar into the glass of absinthe below. As the cloudiness (or louche, for those in the know of the lingo) forms within the absinthe as the water enters, people are stopping by to peek at the procedure as they pass along to their tables. The bartenders tell me they look for the cloudiness to reach a certain level of the glass, when the sugar should also be expended, and the drink at an optimum for enjoyment. I selected my first selection, the Duplais Swiss Absinthe Verte mostly because it was Swiss and, hey, Switzerland is cool. I had no idea that absinthe had particularly historical ties to the country (though the fact that two of my six, [six!] absinthe possibilities were from Switzerland, would suggest that absinthe isn't exactly unheard of there). In any case, the nose was beautiful, mostly anise and fennel, but the taste was immediately astounding and didn't lose an ounce (or milliliter) of its original charm, over the 90+ minutes it took me to consume (believe me, I don't know what the proof is, but there's no need to rush). It was like consuming a breath mint of the absolutely perfect proportions of a square. There was mintiness, there was chewy freshness of herb stems, and a lovely anise base. It was amazing in balance and a treasure to drink.

My second choice, was perhaps a bit wilder and a bit more rustic. The North Shore Distillery Sirène Absinthe from Chicago was much more fiery, much more suggestive of alcohol and had a fiercer edge of raw uncut herbs and even spices. My friend found the first to be a bit too much on the anise side and appreciated the Sirène for its stronger herbal elements. But here we did not agree as I thought the Duplais exquisitely balanced and the rougher edges of the Sirène much harder to navigate--though admittedly it was my second and the tolerance of more alcohol in any form had become a question. Still it was enjoyable, but the Sirène had clearly set the bar. As the bar wound down and cold blasts of air kept entering as they shut down the outside of the restaurant, the time for the cold walk home had come. But what an introduction to the green goddess . . .

Good post. There ain't many of us absinthe aficionados around.

Keith, if you are interested in things like absinthe's Swiss origins (around the Swiss-French border), the absinthe "fountain" traditions, etc., get ahold of Barnaby Conrad's 1988 Absinthe: History in a Bottle, a heavily illustrated history (in large-format paperback) and chief US introduction to the subject over the past 20 years. (Conrad is local to the SF Bay Area incidentally.) Though some of its technical content is weak, this book has a broad overview of the subject (and associated historical and artistic developments). Other classic modern sources are Marie-Claude Delahaye's 1983 L'absinthe: Histoire de la Fee Verte (a major basis for Conrad's book) and Matthew Baggott's 1997 online absinthe technical tutorial (not to be confused with his much lighter and earlier 1993 posting).

Being already interested in absinthe for some decades, as late as 2000 my online absinthe searches returned hits you could count on two hands; Baggott's was the chief summary of related pharmacological science, and Conrad's the main US book. Ted Breaux (Jade Liquors, a pioneering modern US absinthe producer) "first became interested in absinthe ... when he saw Barnaby Conrad's book," reported a 2002 interview I read at the time. Within a few years, what had been a US niche interest ever since absinthe's 1915 ban (and subject of lurid and fascinating misinformation) became more popular, along with a renaissance of interest in cocktails among younger adults. Now the online absinthe hits number in the hundreds of thousands, and publishers have rushed to issue new absinthe books to meet the interest. (In the several that I own or have seen, though sometimes better on absinthe science or modern products, the history and tutorial basics largely restate Conrad.) Exuberant hobbyist websites appeared, again rehashing longstanding information. David Nathan-Maister's thujone.info (started August 2006) is filled with detailed, often specialized modern research references, far more than Baggott posted in 1997, and can be seen as an updated parallel to Baggott although when I've checked it, I found no reference at all to Baggott's pioneering precedent.

That touches on one of my very few complaints about the recent absinthe hobbyist and manufacturer-driven media. Mostly they do a good job of spreading information. Where they've been weak to the point of mythmaking is in omitting historical context (like properly crediting pioneering sources, or other absinthe information prior to their personal interest) and, in some key details, scientific context. Most of the 19th-c. lurid absinthe stigmas were demystified by the 1930s; the scapegoated herbal principle thujone was found to be commonplace in other herbs (never stigmatized or regulated, even by the USFDA); absinthes even pre-ban boasted of being thujone-free by chemical analysis (contrary to the suggestion that this is a recent discovery); even thujone itself is not much of an issue, except for legalistic residues of archaic 19th-c. misinformation about it. Thus, for instance, Breaux told the New Yorker in 2006 about the thujone in the absinthium herb, and its convulsive toxicity (in gross overdose), but omitted to mention that according to the same source he named, (1) caffeine is similarly toxic at the same dose levels and (2) in any absinthe, even thujone-rich, the alcohol dominates the toxicity by a factor of hundreds. These demystifying points have been in mainstream scientific references since 1940 or earlier, yet are strikingly absent in the recent tutorials, even though central to the whole subject. (I've even taken this up with recent articulate hobbyists, including one of the site organizers, but so far they haven't seemed to "get it," replying instead from within their existing assumptions about absinthe, or repeatedly asserting "we know so much more now than a few years ago.")