Absinthe-Minded

Scared? Many people are by Absinthe. Why? It’s one of the enduring myths of alcohol that Absinthe is scary; it makes you hallucinate, it drives you mad, it gets you inordinately drunk…. (well, the last one might be kinda true) What is it about this one spirit that frightens people so much? By people I don’t just mean Joe Public, I mean everyone: bar tender and customer alike. So, to quote Starship Troopers: Would you like to know more?

La Fée Verte (The Green Fairy)

What is it? At heart it’s a green, anise flavoured spirit that is usually highly alcoholic. Flavoured from a variety of botanicals; notably green anise, sweet fennel and the flowers and leaves of artemisia absinthium (or Grande Wormwood in French). It’s the artemisia absinthium which gives the drink its name. Now it’s the artemisia absinthium which is the most interesting part to the drink; this is what contains the wormwood. Wormwood contains trace elements of Thujone which was later to be discovered to be a neurotoxin. Still scared? Stay with me and I’ll allay your fears. We’ll come back to this in a moment.

Wormwood, for the all the fear I’ve just put into you has been used as a medicinal elixir as far back as Greek times, but where we enter into the modern world with it is around 1792 when, according to popular legend a French doctor, working in Switzerland, called Pierre Ordinaire distilled artemisia absinthium with anise and other local Swiss herbs to create a powerful (72%ABV) tonic which was hailed as a medical marvel. This tonic was reputedly passed to a Major Dubied whose son-in-law was Henri-Louis Pernod. Pretty sure most of you reading this will recognise that surname? From there things snowballed rapidly. By 1805 hundreds of distilleries had sprung up across France. Momentum carried on and by the mid 19th century it had become the most popular aperitif in France, so much so that the time between 17:00 and 19:00 was known as "l'heure verte" (the Green Hour). Think about what you associate with the image of absinthe in your mind? Van Gogh, Moulin Rouge, Picasso, Manet, Baudelaire, Rimbaud: tres boheme do you not agree? By about 1870 or so France was consuming 1 million litres of Absinthe. By the time we entered the 20th century that had sky rocketed to 21 million litres! Can’t have been all that bad then?

The Fall From Grace

Now here come the horror stories

“It’ll drive you insane/kill you!”
“It will make you murder!”
“Van Gogh cut his ear off after drinking it!”

Pretty sure we’ve all heard these, or variants of them. Where do these stories stem from? At heart our old friend The Temperance Movement. At the start of the 20th century the Temperance movement was in full swing; all alcohol was evil was must therefore be driven out be it Demon Rum or our friend The Green Fairy. Now we come to the myth of the absinthe ban. Absinthe was never banned per se. To be precise the original ban in France was on the ‘sale’ of absinthe and here it the UK it was never banned. I won’t list the ‘ban’ by country, but if these things tickle your fancy go have a wee nosey here: http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/absinthe/absinthe_law.shtml.

So what prompted the ban other than the temperance movement? Two main stories at the start of the century helped spur this on. The first was a scientific experiment. As I mentioned earlier Thujone, which Wormwood contains traces of, is a powerful neurotoxin. By dosing lab mice with high concentrations of Thujone the mice convulsed and died. Don’t want to be drinking that, do you? But note I said ‘high concentrations’; the equivalent would be drinking 150-200 shots of absinthe. The alcohol content of that would also kill you. Or to put it another way the Thujone content of a sage leaf is higher than that of wormwood, so by rights we should ban sage and onion stuffing.

Right; so that’s the “It’ll drive you insane/kill you!” part covered. What about the murderous intentions it places in the hearts of absinthe drinkers? This stems from the notorious “Absinthe Murder” in Switzerland. In 1905 a gentleman named Jean Lanfray murdered his pregnant wife and two children in a drunken rage. Absinthe was blamed as the culprit after it was revealed he’d drunk two ounces of the stuff. The seven glasses of wine, six glasses of crème de menthes, one coffee laced with cognac and two crème de menthes weren’t mentioned by certain people reporting the story. Absinthe was the culprit and it took the fall. Switzerland did indeed ban absinthe in 1910. This spurred the Temperance movement on and added to their arsenal to drive demon drink from all our shores. (Oh, Lanfray hung himself by the way)

“Van Gogh cut his ear off after drinking it!” Weeellll, maybe he had been drinking. Maybe not. This one I’ll leave well alone. We’ve all done stupid things whilst drinking, but I can’t say I’ve severed part of my ear with a razor blade and handed the piece wrapped in a handkerchief to a prostitute. I’ll attribute this one to the ABV of absinthe, if it is indeed the culprit, rather than anything else.

Back On The Road

So, absinthe was off the map. Where do we go from here? It lived in the memories of people and it was substituted for by pastis and anisette, but it wasn’t quite the same. It had never been huge here in the UK so it wasn’t missed that much. It took until the late 80’s/early 90’s that we began to take to the green fairy. How? Why? Tourism and a British taste for powerful spirits took us to the new destination of the Czech Republic where absinthe could be found, imbibed and brought back to our island. The scary reputation remained in our cultural consciousness, but we took to it quite rapidly. Sadly for the wrong reasons. (But UK drinking culture’s an article for another time) Suffice to say, where there’s a desire, or a market, someone will step in and step up to the plate: enter BBH Spirits who began to import Czech brand Hill’s Absinthe to the UK. Things ramped up rapidly with new EU laws skipping over, or forgetting, individual countries laws regarding Thujone legislation. In 2000 La Fée Absinthe became the first commercially available absinthe produced in France in almost a century.

Suck It And See

So, has this article piqued your curiosity? Well on March 18th Corpse & Cocktail, in conjunction with La Fée Absinthe, step back to the bohemian bars of Paris of yesteryear and enter "l'heure verte”, well 4 hours to be precise. A full menu of absinthe cocktails prepared by the Corpse bar team, including a fully functioning absinthe fountain so you can have your green fairy prepared the way it should be; will, hopefully, allow you to learn to love la fée verte. Come down and find out if it’s a scary as you think it is; we think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.