Everything you know about absinthe is wrong

Banned for a century for inspiring madness and murder, absinthe is legal again. So pour yourself a glass and get to know the real Green Fairy.

By Sarah Hepola

Read more: Drinking, History, Alcohol, Life, Eat and Drink, Food and Travel, Sarah Hepola

Photo: Green_copyright

A collection of absinthe spoons.

Dec. 21, 2007 | Perhaps you already have your own absinthe story. You drank it in New Orleans one foggy night, too full of fumes to remember much aside from the cloudy green swirl of the drink as water drip-dropped into the glass. You smuggled a cheap bottle back from Spain and brought it out at cocktail parties like a magic trick. You tried it at a party where someone mixed a batch in the back room, and it was caustic stuff, as mean as moonshine. You sipped it in a gloomy underground Czech bar, where everyone looked like spies, and the bartender lit the sugar cube aflame. Or perhaps you've never even touched absinthe, maybe you just read about it, and became interested in the lore of the Green Fairy -- how it was a muse to the artists of the belle epoque, how it made people mad, made them hallucinate, made them slaves to the drink, how it drove Van Gogh to cut off his ear. Perhaps you don't have a story about absinthe at all.

Well, now would be a good time to get one.

Absinthe is legal in the United States for the first time since 1912, the year it was banned in America. Eight years later, Prohibition levied the same fate on all spirits, but while beer, wine, and liquor made a triumphant comeback -- expanding into an industry that can cozily encompass both a Courvoisier XO and a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon -- absinthe languished in exile for nearly a century, a casualty of bad publicity, special-interest lobbies and mythology. That allowed absinthe to become something of an urban legend, something to talk about in whispers, with wide eyes. Much is said about absinthe; very little of that is true.

So let's clear up a few misconceptions. Absinthe does not make you hallucinate. It is not wildly addictive. It will not cause you to lop off your ear, unless (possibly, on the off-chance) you are a deeply disturbed painter racked by poverty, heartbreak and mental illness. Rather, absinthe is a good drink. It is most reminiscent of Pernod, a kick of licorice with a lingering menthol taste. (The similarity is not coincidental; Henri-Louis Pernod first commercialized absinthe in France in 1805.) Absinthe's flavor comes from its muscular key components -- anise, wormwood and fennel -- and though it's certainly an acquired taste, there's also something appealing about the ritual and presentation of it. Absinthe has its own special glasses, slotted spoons and drips. Absinthe even has its own verb, "louche," to describe the milky cloud kicking up when water hits the drink. Watching this -- on the right night, in the right light--you start to understand why artists like Toulouse-Lautrec and Rimbaud and Verlaine found inspiration in the stuff. And you start to understand why people might think it contained a little bit of black magic, too.

Absinthe was the drink of 19th-century Paris. At the time, the French wine industry had been decimated, and absinthe, with its otherworldly color and reputation for spurring creativity, matched the decadence and glamour and artistry of the era. Absinthe may not cause hallucinations, but its buzz has been likened to a kind of "waking drunk," in which inhibitions are lowered but synapses fire faster, the perfect companion for a lively barside debate. But things went sour for absinthe as the end of the century approached. Degas' famous 1876 painting, L'Absinthe, is a portrait of overindulgence and isolation: a woman slumped over her cafe table in front of an absinthe glass, face gone slack. In 1890, the book "Wormwood: A Drama of Paris" vilified absinthe, portraying the downward spiral that inevitably follows a drink. (Think "Reefer Madness" for fin-de-siècle Paris.) In 1905, a disturbed Swiss man, drunk on absinthe, murdered his entire family. Absinthe didn't make him do it -- any more than a bipolar who hacks up his neighbor after drinking Jamesons has been deranged by Irish whiskey. But the tide of public opinion had shifted, spurred on by negative digs from prohibitionists and the wine industry, not interested in the competition. European countries began banning absinthe in 1906. Six years later, America followed suit.

Environmental chemist T.A. Breaux, who has studied absinthe for 14 years, explains what led to the drink's decline. "As absinthe became immensely popular, there was a drive to make it cheaper," he says. "In urban areas, where they didn't have a lot of space for distillation equipment, people made absinthes from cheap industrial alcohol, using chemicals that would induce the green color. There were people who had an interest in capitalizing on this, and they failed to make a distinction between these cheaper drinks and real absinthe. It's a little bit like using Mad Dog as a reason to ban Bordeaux."

Absinthe remained legal in Spain and Czechoslovakia and the U.K. -- places where it had never been popular in the first place -- but as the drink's mythology grew, those spots became magnets for tourists, who sought out the stuff for its forbidden-fruit allure. The absinthes were often served with a sugar cube -- as with your iced tea, it's a matter of personal preference -- but in Czechoslovakia, bars began dribbling alcohol over the sugar cube and setting it on fire, one of those barside ta-das that became associated with the experience. "That was actually created by a distributor in England, realizing that Czech absinthes would not louche," says Breaux. "You add ice water and nothing happens, and since that would be an extreme disappointment to the public, they had to come up with some distraction." Breaux, like most absinthe experts, is adamantly against the practice. It caramelizes the sugar, changing the taste of the drink. It burns off the alcohol. It's dangerous. But come on, let's face it: It's also cool.

By the time Breaux started his research in the early 1990s, "the international market was littered with product that had attempted to cash in on the mystique without offering anything substantive. These unscrupulous mixers would throw in some green dye and sell it to tourists, because no one knew what it was or what it was supposed to taste like."

Absinthe became legalized in Europe in 1988, when the European Union established food and wine standards, though years passed before anyone did anything about it. Even in France, people still feared the sinister forces of the Green Fairy. Absinthe's story proves how powerful a story can be even if it isn't true. There are razor blades in the Halloween apples! Someone could steal your kidneys and leave you in a bathtub of ice! And you could start out the evening with a nice cocktail and end it in a mental institution, stark raving maaaaad.

Video: Tasting the devilish drink

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