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Absinth(e)?

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout' started by thadeus, Feb 12, 2006.

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MadMax Member

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pgabriel said:

I believe the children are our future
teach them well and let them lead the way
show them all the beauty they possess inside
give them a sense of pride
to make it easier

let the children's laughter
remind us how it used to be.
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THAT BOY GOT TALENT!!! HE GOOOD!!!

#61 MadMax, Feb 13, 2006

SamFisher Member

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thanks for posting that reggie, who needs absinthe when the good stuff is the wormwood, which I can snort/smoke/eat/drink at my leisure. I'm going to go plant some wormwood right now!

#62 SamFisher, Feb 13, 2006
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MadMax said:

THAT BOY GOT TALENT!!! HE GOOOD!!!
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Show some love for Mr. Randy Watson and Sexual Chocolate.

#63 Baqui99, Feb 13, 2006
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Baqui99 said:

Show some love for Mr. Randy Watson and Sexual Chocolate.
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i want to change my name to Randy Watson. that's absolutely brilliant.

#64 MadMax, Feb 13, 2006
pgabriel Educated Negro

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"you all know him as Joe the Policeman from the What's going Down episode of That's My Momma."

#65 pgabriel, Feb 13, 2006
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A little more about absinthe....

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/011026.html

Absinthe is illegal in most places now, but a century ago it was the most fashionable drink in France--the 19th-century equivalent of cocaine, even requiring a special spoon. You didn't use the perforated absinthe spoon to put the stuff up your nose, though, but to hold a lump of sugar over the absinthe glass while you poured in water. The water diluted the potent liqueur--absinthe was 60 to 75 percent alcohol--while the sugar took off the bitter edge. (The word absinthe is thought to derive from the Greek apsinthion, undrinkable, although the wormwood-flavored beverages of antiquity were different from that sipped in the cafes of Montmartre.) A transparent green when poured from the bottle, absinthe turned milky green, then opalescent with the addition of water. The spoon, the color, and the ritual were part of the mystique of absinthe, which enthusiasts called la fee verte, the Green Fairy.

Drink enough absinthe and you'd see lots of green fairies--or pink elephants. Absinthe was embraced by the artists and bohemians of the Parisian demimonde, who thought it unleashed the imagination, increased mental acuity, and so on. Oscar Wilde, who had more than a casual acquaintance with absinthe, wrote, "After the first glass you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world."

Wilde wasn't the only creative eminence to enjoy absinthe. The roll of literary and artistic types who flirted with the Green Fairy, often at the expense of their art, includes some of the most distinguished names of the 19th century: the poets Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Verlaine; the painters Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Toulouse-Lautrec; and many others who prided themselves on living close to the edge in the glittering if decadent cafe society of the belle epoch. (For a wonderful evocation of absinthe's role in that lost world, see Barnaby Conrad III's 1988 book Absinthe: History in a Bottle.).

It couldn't last. Absinthe was blamed, somewhat unfairly, for the high rate of alcoholism in France (the real culprit was undoubtedly wine, which was consumed in far greater quantities). Temperance advocates and newspapers linked it to several horrifying murders, and it was ultimately banned in France and many other countries in the years leading up to World War I.

Was the stuff really so bad? Many point to the ingredient wormwood (Artemisia absinthium), which contains the neurotoxin thujone. Thujone is chemically similar to THC, the active ingredient in mar1juana, and some speculate that the two compounds act on the brain in similar ways. Others say that even chronic absinthe drinkers couldn't consume enough thujone to do real damage--you'd pass out in a drunken stupor first--and that the real culprit was alcohol.

These days it's all pretty much academic--absinthe remains illegal in most places. It's still made in Spain and the Czech Republic and can be sold in the UK. But the concentration of thujone in the modern product is much less than in the old days. If you'd rather avoid trouble with the law, you can buy Absente, which as you say is an absinthe substitute made with southern wormwood. Doesn't sound like much of a deal to me--you're not getting the genuine article, and it's still highly alcoholic (110 proof). But maybe cirrhosis is a small price to pay to feel like Toulouse-Lautrec.
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Seems to me it'd be easier/cheaper for you guys to just smoke a joint.

Whatever.

#66 droxford, Feb 13, 2006
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droxford said:

Seems to me it'd be easier/cheaper for you guys to just smoke a joint.

Whatever.
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STOP ENCOURAGING THE KIDS!!!! GEEZ!!!

#67 Master Baiter, Feb 13, 2006

mateo Member

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True, and Oxycontin is probably close enough to opium....but hanging out with French plantation owner's naked wives somewhere up the river in Cambodia smoking opium is a hell of a lot cooler than popping grandma's pain pills.

There's something to be said about the novelty of experimentation, whether it be in various chemicals, or in sex, or even in art or music. New and different tends to trump the same ole same ole. Why else do highly educated married couples have the kinkiest sex lives?

#68 mateo, Feb 13, 2006
Last edited: Feb 13, 2006
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mateo said:

True, and Oxycontin is probably close enough to opium....but hanging out with French plantation owner's naked wives somewhere up the river in Cambodia smoking opium is a hell of a lot cooler than popping grandma's pain pills.

There's something to be said about the novelty of experimentation, whether it be in various chemicals, or in sex, or even in art or music. New and different tends to trump the same ole same ole. Why else do married, highly educated married couples have the kinkiest sex lives?
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this post deserves a medal.

#69 SWTsig, Feb 13, 2006
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i ordered mine from www.eabsinthe.com

dont know if that site still works, but the **** was so incredible

#70 cwebbster, Feb 13, 2006
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Way to go on making your point based on a study conducted in the 1800s, reggie. I wonder what modern scientists have learned since then?

Anyways, here's an article about this Ted Breaux guy.

The Mystery of the Green Menace

It's been celebrated as a muse and banned as a poison. Now an obsessed microbiologist has cracked the code for absinthe - and distilled his own.

By Brian Ashcraft

At first, Ted Breaux dismissed the urgent warnings on TV and radio. He even ignored the sirens that started blaring Saturday afternoon. "The last two times they evacuated the city, I stayed," says Breaux, 39, a chemist and environmental microbiologist. But when he woke up on Sunday, August 28, the hurricane had become a Category 5 and was still bearing down on New Orleans. He decided it was time to get out of his house on the floodplain just south of Lake Pontchartrain. He packed his Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution with all the essentials: clothes, toiletries, a laptop, some World War II rifles, ammo, and $15,000 worth of absinthe.

It took Breaux six hours to go 20 miles, and a full day to reach refuge in Huntsville, Alabama. He spent the next week watching Fox News, looking at aerial photos of New Orleans on his laptop, wondering if his friends had made it out, and cursing himself for not remembering to grab his original 1908 copy of Aux Pays d'Absinthe.

Raised in New Orleans, a city once dubbed the Absinthe Capital of the World, Breaux has long been fascinated with the drink. Absinthe is a 140-proof green liqueur made from herbs like fennel, anise, and the exceptionally bitter leaves of Artemisia absinthium. That last ingredient, also known as wormwood, gives the drink its name - and its sinister reputation. For a century, absinthe has been demonized and outlawed, based on the belief that it leads to absinthism - far worse than mere alcoholism. Drinking it supposedly causes epilepsy and "criminal dementia."

Breaux has made understanding the drink his life's work. He has pored over hundred-year-old texts, few of them in English. He has corresponded with other amateur liquor historians. The more he's learned, the more he's felt compelled to use his knowledge of chemistry to crack the absinthe code, figure out exactly what's in it, puncture the myths surrounding it - and maybe even drink a glass or two.

Dressed in a black muscle T-shirt, blue jeans, and a Dolce & Gabbana belt, Breaux looks as if he'd be more at home on Bourbon Street than in a research lab. It's a humid summer morning in July, about a month before Hurricane Katrina will strike, and he's showing me around Environmental Analytical Solutions Inc., a chemical testing facility among the warehouses and body shops near Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport.

On the outside, EASI is classic New Orleans: red brick, white pillars. But inside it's more like a set from War Games: dot matrix printers, ancient PCs, and nine Hewlett-Packard gas chromatography-mass spectrometer machines attached to large blue tanks of helium and hydrogen. This is where Breaux does his lab work, testing water samples for pollution and pesticides. In his downtime, he studies absinthe here.

Using the GCMS apparatus, he's able to break the liqueur down into its component molecules. "It's like forensics," Breaux says, gesturing toward the machines. "Give me one microliter of absinthe and I know exactly what it's going to taste like."

Breaux explains how the testing works. He takes a bottle of the liqueur, inserts a syringe through the cork (absinthe oxidizes like wine once the bottle is open), and extracts a few milliliters. He transfers the sample into a vial, which is lifted by a robotic arm into the gas chromatography tower. There it is separated into its components. Then the mass spectrometer identifies them and measures their relative quantities.

One of the ingredients is thujone, a compound in wormwood that is toxic if it's ingested, capable of causing violent seizures and kidney failure. Breaux hands me a bottle of pure liquid thujone. "Take a whiff," he says with an evil grin. I recoil at the odor - it's like menthol laced with napalm. This is the noxious chemical compound responsible for absinthe's bad reputation. The question that's been debated for years is, Just how much thujone is there in absinthe?

Absinthe was first distilled in 1792 in Switzerland, where it was marketed as a medicinal elixir, a cure for stomach ailments. High concentrations of chlorophyll gave it a rich olive color. In the 19th century, people began turning to the minty drink less for pains of the stomach than for pains of the soul. Absinthe came to be associated with artists and Moulin Rouge bohemians. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Van Gogh, and Picasso were devotees. Toulouse-Lautrec carried some in a hollowed-out cane. Oscar Wilde wrote, "What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset?" Soon absinthe was the social lubricant of choice for a broad swath of Europeans - artists and otherwise. In 1874, the French sipped 700,000 liters of the stuff; by the turn of the century, consumption had shot up to 36 million liters, driven in part by a phylloxera infestation that had devastated the wine-grape harvest.

By the early 20th century, absinthe was becoming popular in America. It found a natural reception in New Orleans, where the bon temps were already rolling. Breaux's own great-grandparents were known to enjoy an occasional glass. But the drink was drawing fire for its thujone content. "It is truly madness in a bottle, and no habitual drinker can claim that he will not become a criminal," declared one politician. The anti-absinthe fervor climaxed in 1905, when Swiss farmer Jean Lanfray shot his pregnant wife and two daughters after downing two glasses. (Overlooked was what else Lanfray consumed that day: crème de menthe, cognac, seven glasses of wine, coffee with brandy, and another liter of wine.) By the end of World War I, the "green menace" was made illegal everywhere in western Europe except Spain. No reputable distillery still made it.

The son of a NASA engineer, Breaux was always interested in how things work. At 13, he snuck out at night and rode his bike to the University of Louisiana campus to hack into its mainframe. "I'd snoop in people's records and steal the source code for videogames," he says. When he was 14, he figured out how to hot-wire bulldozers left overnight at construction sites; he and his friends would stage races. Later, while majoring in microbiology in Lafayette, Breaux tended bar and developed an interest in the chemistry of liquor. "Why is this tequila better than that one? Because it's aged a certain length of time or made with a higher concentration of a certain plant," he says. "I could see the science in it."

Breaux became a connoisseur at a young age. He was shelling out a hundred bucks for cognac and mystifying his college buddies by bringing Martell Cordon Bleu to parties. So it's no wonder that, a decade later, immersed in the history and makeup of absinthe, he was eager to taste the stuff. But it was nearly impossible to find. He had to content himself with its paraphernalia. While walking through the French Quarter one Saturday morning a decade ago, he spotted an absinthe spoon in the window of an antique shop. The slotted, sieve-like device was an essential part of the ritual of preparing the drink: You placed a sugar cube on the spoon and slowly poured cold water through it to dilute the strong liqueur. Breaux started stockpiling absinthe accessories, but this proved to be a frustrating tease. "It was like having a pipe but nothing to smoke."

So Breaux decided to make some himself. He found a French-language history book with "pre-ban protocols," a vague description of how absinthe was made back before it was outlawed. Armed with the protocols, he prepared a batch in the lab. The result? "Not very good," he concedes. "I couldn't imagine that being the most popular liqueur in France."

He got his chance to taste the real thing in 1996, when a friend spotted a bottle marked "old French liquor" at an estate sale. They were asking $300, and Breaux, seeing it was a vintage Spanish Pernod Tarragona absinthe, immediately wrote a check. When he got it to his lab, he plunged a syringe through the cork, extracted one precious sip, and downed it. "It had a honeyed texture, distinct herbal and floral notes, and a gentle roundness uncharacteristic of such a strong liquor," he says. "Those protocols were crap."

Breaux wasn't the only one rediscovering the long-banned beverage. In Europe, food regulations adopted by the EU in 1988 had neglected to mention absinthe, and when they superseded national laws, the drink was effectively re-legalized. New distilleries were popping up all over Europe, selling what Breaux dismisses as "mouthwash and vodka in a bottle, with some aromatherapy oil." Absinthe had disappeared so completely for so long that no one knew how to make it anymore. Including Breaux, who continued trying to reverse engineer it in his lab.

The new absinthes became popular among hipsters, just as the drink had been 125 years before. But now the presence of thujone was a selling point. Marilyn Manson boasted of recording an album while "on" absinthe. Johnny Depp compared its effects to mar1juana. "Drink too much," he said, "and you suddenly realize why Van Gogh cut off his ear."

This wasn't just idle celebrity conjecture. In a 1989 Scientific American article, an American biochemist named Wilfred Arnold hypothesized that Van Gogh's insanity (acute intermittent porphyria, he speculated) was caused by the thujone in absinthe. Based on the description of raw materials used to make the liqueur, Arnold calculated that the thujone content was a dangerous 250 parts per million. "I would advise not drinking it," he says.

Breaux rejects Arnold's methodology. "He didn't take the effects of the distillation process into account," Breaux says. "He made a WAG - a wild-assed guess." Breaux wanted to settle the thujone question once and for all. And he was uniquely positioned to do so. "Back when the original was around, they didn't have any decent analytical chemistry. And when Arnold performed his research, he didn't have any samples of the original liqueur. I have both," he says.

At the EASI lab, Breaux ran tests on the pre-ban absinthe samples, as well as on samples spiked with thujone (from the very bottle I had sniffed). This allowed him to isolate the toxic compound. He spent his free time studying the test results, and late one night in June 2000 he had his answer. "I was stunned. Everything that I had been told was complete nonsense." In the antique absinthes he had collected, the thujone content was an order of magnitude smaller than Arnold's predictions. In many instances, it was a homeopathically minuscule 5 parts per million.

Breaux went public with his findings, but not in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. "Here I am with just a bachelor's in microbiology. I knew I could be tarred and feathered." Instead, he posted his test results in the discussion threads at La Fee Verte, an online gathering place for absinthe geeks. Flame wars erupted, and Breaux cited his research to buttress his point about thujone concentrations. The site's moderator eventually dubbed him "elite absinthe enforcer."

Breaux's conclusions were vindicated in early 2005, when a food-safety group working for the German government tested pre-ban absinthe. Dirk Lachenmeier, who ran the study (called "Thujone - Cause of Absinthism?") concluded that ABSINTHE IS NOT ANY MORE HARMFUL THAN OTHER SPIRIT DRINKS. But the biggest vindication came at the Absinth des Jahres contest in 2004, for which expert judges sampled newly distilled absinthes from all over the world. A little-known candidate, Nouvelle-Orléans, garnered perfect scores and won a gold medal. "Without doubt, the release of Nouvelle-Orléans was a milestone in the history of modern absinthe," says Arthur Frayn, one of the judges. The distiller? Ted Breaux.

"You can read a paragraph or two on how to make wine, but that doesn't mean you're going to make Chateau Latour," says Breaux. "What I've done is, I've made a Chateau Latour." In the process of proving that absinthe wasn't insanity-inducing poison, he had cracked its code. He'd sourced the concentrations of all the herbs it contained and even traced them to their original regions of cultivation. He knew precisely which classes of wine spirits those herbs were combined with. Making and marketing his own brand was the next logical step. "Nouvelle-Orléans is part vintage absinthe, part Ted Breaux, and part New Orleans flair," he says.

Nouvelle-Orléans is just one absinthe formulation Breaux has mastered. He also makes re-creations of pre-ban bottles. He shows me one that he just distilled, based on an Edouard Pernod absinthe, and I'm dying to taste it. Breaux begins to prepare it in the traditional French manner, a process as intricate as a tea ceremony. First he decants a couple of ounces into two widemouthed glasses specially made for the drink. A strong licorice aroma wafts across the table. Then he adds 5 or 6 ounces of ice-cold water, letting it trickle through a silver dripper into the glass. "Pour it slowly," he says. "That's the secret to making it taste good. If the water's too warm, it will taste like donkey piss."

The drink turns milky, and a condensate floats to the top. This is called the louche, a word that's come to mean "disreputable." Breaux hands it to me and tells me there's no need to stir away the louche or add sugar to an absinthe this fine. I take a sip. The flavor is subtle, dry, complex. It makes my tongue feel a little numb.

"It's like an herbal speedball," he says. "Some of the compounds are excitatory, some are sedative. That's the real reason artists liked it. Drink two or three glasses and you can feel the effects of the alcohol, but your mind stays clear - you can still work."

Breaux is on his second glass, and I'm still finishing my first as he brings me up to speed on the latest developments in his ongoing absinthe detective story - if most of the thujone isn't present in the drink, where has it gone? "My initial estimation was that it's left behind in the distillation process. But now, I think it probably evaporates out of the Artemisia absinthium when it dries," he says.

I take a few swallows from my second glass of the 140-proof liquor with increasingly unsteady hands. "Americans drink to get drunk," observes Breaux. "Whereas in France, getting drunk is just a consequence of sampling too much wine you really like." I'm starting to feel very, very French.

In between hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Ted Breaux went back to New Orleans. He snuck past two police checkpoints and into the Gentilly Terrace neighborhood to survey the damage to his home. Its contents were destroyed, and it reeked of sewage and rot. The house will need to be bulldozed. Breaux says he won't rebuild on that spot, which is 8 feet below sea level. But neither will he flee the city where his family has lived for 200 years. "I just don't know what's going to happen next."

One thing Breaux knows is that his work with absinthe will go on. Nouvelle-Orléans is distilled in France and sold only in Europe. Absinthe is still illegal in the US under FDA regulations. ("But American connoisseurs are able to find it," he says cryptically.) Breaux supervises its production in the small Loire Valley town of Saumur, at a beautiful old distillery with ironwork by Gustave Eiffel and 125-year-old absinthe-making equipment. He struck a deal with the Combier family, which owns the factory. "I said, let me distill here, and I'll help you create new liqueurs," Breaux says.

Later this year, the partners will release their latest innovation - a liqueur made from tobacco. Specifically, a strong, spicy strain of tobacco called Perique, which Breaux claims is the world's rarest commercial crop. "It's grown on one 15-acre plot in south Louisiana, near Convent." Tobacco beverages are tricky to prepare - and even more scarce than absinthe. After all, as Breaux explains, "nicotine is toxic if it's ingested."

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.11/absinthe.html
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#71 Oski2005, Feb 13, 2006
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And now, time for a photo summary:

reggietodd:

and

#72 Mr. Mooch, Feb 13, 2006
Last edited: Feb 13, 2006
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cwebbster said:

i ordered mine from www.eabsinthe.com

dont know if that site still works, but the **** was so incredible
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tell us what happened!

#73 underoverup, Feb 13, 2006

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reggietodd does not have time for your juvenile games and flames. He has many upcoming projects to work on, such as the screenplay for Reefer Madness 2.

#74 SamFisher, Feb 13, 2006
thadeus Member

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Oski2005 said:

Anyways, here's an article about this Ted Breaux guy.
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I was about to post that article.

Here is where I ordered the absinthe from, and I bought the Nouvelle-Orléans. Made by Ted Breaux.

And when this bottle is done, I will probably order more.

#75 thadeus, Feb 13, 2006
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SamFisher said:

reggietodd does not have time for your juvenile games and flames. He has many upcoming projects to work on, such as the screenplay for Reefer Madness 2.
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Electric Bongaloo?

#76 Buck Turgidson, Feb 13, 2006
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#77 thegary, Feb 13, 2006
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SamFisher said:

reggietodd does not have time for your juvenile games and flames. He has many upcoming projects to work on, such as the screenplay for Reefer Madness 2.
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#78 reggietodd, Feb 13, 2006

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Buck Turgidson said:

Electric Bongaloo?
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LMFAO, I will never forget Breakin' 2 as long as I live. ANd I never even saw it, much less the original Breakin'

#79 SamFisher, Feb 13, 2006
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reggietodd said:

A little defensive today huh? If you're an adult, do what you wish, but kids could be reading this and everyone's putting in their 2 cents about "how cool this drug is" or whatever.
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Well, since I was one of the posters who was talking about how "cool" the drug is, I think I deserve a chance to respond to this. First, I was relating my experience: I neither endorsed nor dissuaded people drinking absinthe. I don't feel it's my job to tell other people how to think and/or feel.

Secondly, I'm sick and tired of people using children as an excuse to tell other people what to do. So here it is: f**k kids. F**k 'em all. You don't like me saying 'f**k' in front of kids? Well, guess what? I don't f**king like kids. I refuse to live my life afraid of what my actions might do to the precious little angels. The Internet is not a playpen. It's not daycare. Kids don't belong on the net. Period. If they are online, and their parents aren't standing over their shoulder watching their every move, then the parents deserve a warped child. You want kids to live in a world without drugs? Without profanity? Without sex? Without violence? Well, guess what: ain't no such place.

#80 FrontRowJoe, Feb 14, 2006

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