| 19th December 2007 08:44 AM |
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| Barney Fife |
This says it's legal:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/dining/05absi.html?_r=2&8dpc&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
By PETE WELLS
Published: December 5, 2007
EARLIER this year, when Lance Winters heard that absinthe was being sold in the United States again for the first time since 1912, he shrugged it off. Then he reconsidered. He’d spent 11 years perfecting an absinthe at St. George Spirits, the distillery where he works in Alameda, Calif., and considered it one of the best things he’d ever made. Why not sell it?
Over the past few months, he must have wished he’d stuck to his first instinct.
The division of the Treasury Department that approves alcohol packaging sent back his label seven times, he said. They thought it looked too much like the British pound note. They wondered why it was called Absinthe Verte when their lab analysis said the liquid inside was amber. Mostly, it seemed to him, they didn’t like the monkey.
“I had the image of a spider monkey beating on a skull with femur bones,” Mr. Winters said. But he said that the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau thought the label “implied that there are hallucinogenic, mind-altering or psychotropic qualities” to the product.
“I said, ‘You get all that just from looking at a monkey?’”
His frustration came to a sudden end last Wednesday, when he learned the agency had finally granted approval to his St. George Absinthe Verte, the first American-made absinthe on the market in almost a century.
Since the start of the year, at least four absinthes, including two from Europe and one from South America, have been cleared for sale. At the same time, hundred-year-old legends about its ties to murder and madness have been discredited. For years, absinthe’s chief appeal has been its shady reputation and contraband status. It was said to have caused artists like Van Gogh to hallucinate. Now that it is safe and legal, will anyone still drink it?
To find out, I tried the two absinthes on sale in New York along with an early sample of St. George Absinthe Verte. And I was astonished by how delicate, gentle and refreshing they were. Astonished in part because of my earlier run-ins with absinthe. There was the Portuguese stuff that looked like radiator fluid and tasted like a mouthful of copper. There was the Czech product that a friend smuggled past customs in a mouthwash bottle. I would have preferred the mouthwash.
Another European brand is “the color of reactor cooling fluid and there’s nothing natural about that,” said Mr. Winters, who would know. Before turning to alcohol as a full-time job, he worked as an engineer on a reactor on board a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
Absinthe aficionados agree that a lot of absinthe isn’t very good.
“Before Hurricane Katrina destroyed a lot of my things, I had a very extensive collection of bad absinthe,” said T. A. Breaux, a former resident of New Orleans who designed one of the new absinthes, Lucid. Most of Mr. Breaux’s bad absinthe is modern, but the taste of absinthe has been problematic for centuries. The word comes from the Greek apsinthion, which means undrinkable. The essential ingredient in absinthe, a medicinal herb called grand wormwood, is profoundly bitter. How bitter?
“Ever take malaria pills?” Mr. Winters asked. “Ever bite into one?”
Mr. Winters had never tasted absinthe when he started making his own. Nor did he hope to sell it. He was just playing. “You know, give a boy a still,” he said. He worked from a recipe in a back issue of Scientific American, then adjusted the formula. “It was just a manic obsession with the ingredients that drove me to tweak the formula.”
After a few tries, Mr. Winters found that grand wormwood was best used in just the first step of absinthe making, when it is infused into grape brandy along with anise and fennel and then distilled, so its bitterness could be left behind in the still. In the second step, he infused a portion of what came out of the still with lemon balm, hyssop, tarragon and other botanicals, including a much less bitter cousin of grand wormwood. Finally this flavorful infusion is mixed back into the result of the first distillation.
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| 19th December 2007 12:05 PM |
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| Sir Stonesalot |
I had some stuff that was made somewhere near Prague, back when I was stationed in Germany. I remember that it was said to be very old. It tasted...well...I don't know what raw sewage actually tastes like...but I'm guessing it would taste a lot like that stuff. Completely vile.
There was a whole ritual that went along with preparing it for consumption. I remember almost nothing of that. Something got set on fire and then poured into something else and that got set on fire and poured over sugar...I dunno, it was a long time ago.
The buzz was...fucked if I know. I really don't recall much of that night. I DO remember that it was a happy buzz...it wasn't like a mean whiskey buzz or anything. I don't remember hallucinating, although that may have happened. I seem to recall being fucked up for quite a long time, but I'm fuzzy on that too.
Never did it again after that(I was invited back several times for some more, but begged off)...and I doubt that I ever will again. But I'll never say never. I'll not be seeking it out though... |
| 19th December 2007 12:23 PM |
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| Joey |
" I DO remember that it was a happy buzz...it wasn't like a mean whiskey buzz or anything. I don't remember hallucinating, although that may have happened. I seem to recall being fucked up for quite a long time .... "
This makes Joey smile .
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| 19th December 2007 06:04 PM |
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| Bloozehound |
I picked up a bottle of Absinthe today
The liquor store dude told me it was the brand that caused all the uproar here when it was released in the US this year
I'll be the judge of that |
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