Absinthe for reals.

Writing about the Sazerac at Bardenay inspired me to share some interesting information about absinthe... the mother of all anisettes. I recently heard about a company called Veridian Spirits out of New York that is legally producing real wormwood absinthe called Lucid. Legally? Yes.

Althought absinthe is most popular for its late-19th century fame in France, its origin is Switzerland. The name comes from the scientific designation of the wormwood plant, artemisia absinthium, which contains thujone... the chemical that gives us that funny feeling and consequently made the stuff illegal all over the world by about 1915. There were also a series of murders around the height of the drink's popularity in Switzerland, and the government attributed the crimes to the psychotic effects of absinthe and started a mass scare/obsession with la fee verte... the green fairy. The Temperance Movement in the US eliminated the possibility of bringing the absinthe back to us until 2007, when the regulations concerning the margin for error in the detection of thujone allowed Veridian Spirits to push absinthe production through the FDA, and make a way for the rest of us to get silly on that funny green stuff...

I am tracking down a case of this stuff because I want to make Sazeracs the way Thomas Handy made them in 1870 New Orleans. One day, it would be amazing to scare up vintage bottles of every Sazerac component and have a small party and drink, like... old school Sazeracs. We could even try and find some Sazerac de Forge Cognac...