Absinthe, the Potent Green Fairy
by Stuart Mangrum

After languishing in obscurity for the better part of a century, absinthe is enjoying an unlikely renaissance in fin-de-siecle San Francisco. No fashionable party seems complete these days without hipsters sipping murky glasses of bitter green homebrew, or more likely dumping them into the potted plants when they think no one's looking. No wonder, really, that Proust stuck to his beer and heroin. Absinthe is an acquired taste, and a difficult one to acquire at that. I should know: I've been drinking the stuff for fifteen years, and I still haven't quite made up my mind.

My first absinthe experience was in a strobe-lit, over-amplified GI bar on Okinawa. What I drank was not the "Green Fairy" of the Belle Epoch but the "Purple Haze" of Koza City: a dangerous mix of gin, absinthe, violet and sweet & sour that we'd drink after recon missions to wash the radio chatter out of our heads. Japan is one of the few places on earth where you can still buy absinthe over the counter, but as a US national with a top secret clearance, I was theoretically risking my job every time I ordered a drink. For that matter I wasn't supposed to patronize the off-base drug stores either, where you could buy Valium and Dexedrine over the counter without a prescription, along with litres of medicinal ether and four-packs of Bron, that powerful, marvelous little speedball of a cough syrup. Oh well. As my friend Dr. Anderson always says, life without adventure is nothing.

Different bars in the vill all served their own variations on the basic Purple Haze formula, with escalating adjectives to let you know how much absinthe was allegedly in the mix: Regular, Super, Special, Extra, etc. My friend Takeo at the Rock House Purple Haze (actual bar name) created a worst-case-scenario he called the Big Fire, a warhead-like drink crowned by a mushroom cloud of absinthe that took up two-thirds of the glass. Surprisingly tasty, extraordinarily strong, and oddly beautiful under the black lights, upstairs on Gate Two Street, where the walls were covered with photos and the stereo moved enough air to push empties off the bar. Two Big Fires and you'd better hope you lost your car keys. Three or four and you'd be hallucinating, and probably doing things you would't remember in the morning. Or wouldn't want to remember. I woke up once in my dorm room, pants snagged around muddy boot-tops, tangled in purple-stained clothes that I couldn't quite peel from my stiff, aching limbs. No wallet, no car keys, no self-respect. Worse, the top of my head felt like it had been lopped off with a pavement saw. If there's any human condition more miserable than an absinthe hangover, I pray it never happens to me.

Yet despite all the mornings after, when I got back to the States I found myself pining for absinthe in the same way I'd once yearned for Mexican food on the other side of the International Date Line. Elusive and unobtainable, there just didn't seem to be any way to get it. Once a friend smuggled me back a quart in a green plastic canteen, but it only lasted the night, and after that the memories began to fade. Then, years later, my wife Michelle and I obtained a recipe from a friend in Portland and decided to mix up a batch of our own.

To be fair, the project really belonged to Michelle and Miss P. They did all the work, measuring exotic oils into a pitcher of grain alcohol drop by drop and stirring the whole affair with a glass rod while I lounged in a kitchen chair sipping red wine, scratching the ears of Marcel the cat while P's roommate Lance, the smartest man he's ever met, lectured us all on the neurological effects of thujone, an isomer of camphor that is absinthe's key component.

That first batch was, to put it bluntly, awful. Michelle and P promptly discarded the recipe and let their well-developed culinary instincts take over. Each of the six essential oils, which Michelle had obtained by mail-order, came under the intense scrutiny of two sensitive noses before being added to the second batch, with proportions adjusted up or down by consensus. The result was infinitely better than the first batch, but still bore little resemblance to the commercial absinthe we'd enjoyed in Okinawa. Batch three was better still, but by that point our taste buds were too exhausted to tell. We blended the three to afford an acceptable compromise, then bottled the lot and hauled it out to Burning Man, where it made for an exciting and lively evening at Miss P's desert cafe. To my knowledge, not a drop survived the trip, and no potted plants were reported injured or killed.

After our return from the playa, the research continued. We learned from our friend Miss V, a landscape designer and expert on exotic plants, that while the drink may be illegal in this country its principal ingredient, the wormwood plant, is widely available as an ornamental. It's a low-growing, grey-green shrub with lacy leaves, known to the botanists as artemesia absinthum. Before long it was thriving in our suburban backyard, and Michelle was experimenting with an extract version of absinthe.

Making absinthe from the plant itself, rather than from processed oils, has two major advantages. First, adding oils to grain alcohol is the brewer's equivalent of making kool-aid; a shortcut approach that's never going to yield anything particularly interesting or complex. Second, wormwood oil cannot be legally sold if it contains more than trace amounts of thujone, its active ingredient. Unless you're working with the plant, you're only making flavored Everclear, not real absinthe.

Soaking crushed leaves in alcohol, on the other hand, yields a potent extract with all the active ingredients a refined absinthe fiend might hope to ingest. Michelle developed a new recipe, based around this extract and flavored with brandy and essential oils. Miss P, working independently, came up with another approach: take a bottle of Pernod, which is essentially absinthe without the thujone, and mix it up with wormwood extract. Both versions were well-received at the last Proust Wake.

To drink absinthe in the European manner requires a little patience and the correct equipment. A measure of the liquor is poured into a stemmed glass, over which is placed a small, slotted spoon developed specifically for this purpose (though a fork will do the job if you aren't lucky enough to own an absinthe spoon). Place a sugar cube on the spoon and apply a slow trickle of ice-cold water. With a little practice, you can get the sugar to dissolve without clouding or "bruising" the absinthe, yielding a beautiful green cocktail that will rip the top of your head off. Prousit!

P Segal