Absinthe: The American Remix – New York Times

My Review~ Well I tried Absente over the New Years, and well I’m not the biggest connoisseur of liquors, I can tell you this. It was pretty good stuff. It had this very unique color and had this strange lingering aftertaste that was quite pleasant. It was a fairly refined drink with a smooth draw, tastes like candy when mixed with just sugar water

Like black licorice, and then it had this weired sensation like you were drinking the devils brew. You could actually feel it on your tongue. It was probably just psychological, and based on me knowing it’s long and colorful history, so I don’t doubt it.

Priced at around $40 for a 1/5 it isn’t the cheapest stuff on the shelf, nor the most expensive. “But it is good stuff” ~Peilo

 I had worked mass amounts of hours over the holidays, and went from being on days to working midnights. I worked 84 hours X-mas week, which I had never worked that many hours in a single week before (it sucked) I couldn’t get back to a normal schedule for the life of me.  I was already out of my element when I started drinking the stuff for sure but still.     :-)

I would love to tell you it produced real hallucinations, but it didn’t. It did however exponentially enhance the music I zoned out to before bed ~ My Last Mix of 07′. Speaking of mix,  I mixed my absinthe with Redbull and sugar water. ~ But anyways back to the real story, not my review—>

In praise of the opaque green liqueur beloved by his creative contemporaries, Oscar Wilde once posed the rhetorical question, “What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset?”

The prosaic answer, at least for Americans, has long been one of legality: sunsets can be freely enjoyed, but absinthe was forbidden because it contained thujone, a potentially toxic compound.

Intrepid drinkers have worked around the ban by ordering imported bottles off the Internet or smuggling them back from Eastern Europe. Now they have a third, less dodgy option: Lucid, which is being marketed as the first legal, genuine American absinthe in nearly a century.

Lucid Absinthe Supérieure: Genuine absinthe available in US~

Absinthe, What is Absinthe? About its Science, Chemistry and Structure
Prohibition is finally over!

Introducing lucid, Absinthe Supérieure. lucid represents a breakthrough product for the U.S. market, as it is the first true, Grande Wormwood-based Absinthe of its type since before prohibition. Unlike imitators in the U.S. and many of the so-called “Absinthe” products that litter the international markets, lucid is crafted directly from select whole herbs, including Grande Wormwood, and never from cheaper assemblages, macerations, extracts or oils. ABSINTHE INFO

Lucid is the debut product from Viridian Spiritsof Manhasset, N.Y., founded in early 2006. According to Jared Gurfein, Viridian’s president, the company’s first order of business was to contact Ted Breaux, a chemist known for his detailed analyses of vintage absinthes.

A New Orleans native, Mr. Breaux now produces absinthes in Saumur, France, using the same recipes and ingredients — including the plant Artemisia absinthium, or grand wormwood — employed by his 19th-century predecessors.

Mr. Gurfein asked Mr. Breaux whether he could produce an absinthe that would pass regulatory muster with American authorities — meaning that it would not contain thujone. Mr. Breaux said that would be fairly easy, given his belief that, contrary to popular opinion, 19th century absinthes contained relatively little thujone to begin with — less than 5 parts per million, according to his tests, rather than much higher estimates that have been bandied about.

Still, Mr. Breaux knew that removing thujone entirely might harm the taste. “I had to get a handle on the whole thujone issue without compromising the character and the flavor of the drink,” he said. To accomplish this, Mr. Breaux blended the grand wormwood with green anise and sweet fennel from Europe, instead of using more-affordable imports from East Asia. Using herbs from Europe, absinthe’s native continent, he said, gives the drink an earthier essence.

Mr. Breaux also had to keep the American palate in mind while developing Lucid. “In the U.S., anise is a sort of a strange flavor,” he said. “We don’t get a lot of exposure to it.” So Mr. Breaux made sure that Lucid had a slightly cleaner, crisper taste than its European peers.

Several Lucid prototypes were ready by last July; Mr. Gurfein and his staff at Viridian used an office taste test to select the formula they would take to market. That formula was then sent to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, a division of the Treasury Department, which checked the absinthe for traces of thujone and other impurities and approved it. The bureau also reviewed Lucid’s bottle, paying close attention to the words on the back.

“They wanted to make sure that we were going to market this responsibly, that we didn’t intend to piggyback on some of the myths,” Mr. Gurfein said. Absinthe’s fabled reputation for causing hallucinations and madness has since been debunked.

While Lucid was awaiting regulatory approval in the United States, Mr. Breaux kept busy perfecting the production process. He uses antique copper stills, which were not built for speed. Scaling up production by a factor of 100 over the prototyping phase, Mr. Breaux said, was a challenge, especially when it came to keeping the herbal flavor consistent from bottle to bottle.

Lucid will be available starting next month, priced at $59.95 for a 750-milliliter bottle. A Web site, DrinkLucid.com, will soon post information on liquor stores that will carry the product.

I sampled the 124-proof liqueur last week, while watching the National Basketball Association playoffs. When diluted with water and a pinch of sugar, the absinthe’s taste is strong and pleasant. And the buzz has an odd way of focusing the mind — I’ve rarely been so entranced by the swish of a basketball net.