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Absinthe the drink

When a man named Major Dubied discovered the product he found that it cured indigestion, improved the appetite, and was good for fevers and chills. He was so impressed that he bought the recipe from the Henriod sisters and started manufacturing it himself. In 1797 his daughter married a man named Henri-Louis Pernod, and the Pernod drink dynasty began. Before long Dubied moved his operations from Switzerland to France, to save on import duty. He had an absinthe factory at Pontarlier, in the Jura region bordering Switzerland. As the drink became more popular, daily production increased exponentially from 16 litres to 408 litres to 20,000 litres. Competitors sprang up, and by the time absinthe was banned there were no less than twenty-five distilleries in the small town of Pontarlier.

Absinthes varied in quality. The best were distilled, using grape alcohol, while the inferior ones were simply macerated, or had vegetable essences added to industrial alcohol. Typically, dried wormwood (Artemisia absinthium, or grande absinthe) anise and fennel would be steeped overnight in alcohol. This mixture was then boiled to produce the distillate of alcohol combined with steam distilled terpenoids from the herbs. For further refinement more herbs could then be added, such as ‘petite absinthe’ (artemisia pontica), hyssop, and lemon balm, and it could then be filtered. It could also be double-distilled, for greater smoothness and integration of contents. Processes and recipes varied, but the salient point is that strong alcohol is not created in the making of absinthe, as it is with whisky or brandy: instead, alcohol, wormwood and other herbs are simply added together, with varying degrees of refinement. The traditional green colour comes – or did come, initially – from chlorophyll, which is faded by light, hence the need for shady green bottles.

Effects of absinthe

A culture of home-made absinthe drinking has recently gained momentum in America: at its simplest by steeping wormwood leaves in vodka or Pernod. “Kurt”, on the Internet, reports soaking about two ounces of wormwood in alcohol and angostura bitters, then adding an ounce of oil of anise and leaving the mixture for five days. Far from getting drunk, says Kurt, “One shot was enough to really wake me up, and provided two hours of vivid imagination and a euphoric stimulation… I felt very creative and invigorated, but at the same time intoxicated. Vision was slightly distorted (more noticeable in darkness). There was a euphoria and stimulation that had a very unique feel. And this was all due to the absinthe, since the amount of alcohol consumed was under one ounce.” Kurt grows fond of his “tincture of wormwood” drink (and he goes on to try more evolved recipes, with parsley, fennel and anise), but he finally concludes that his memory seems to be deteriorating badly, even after he has stopped drinking it. He signs off with “I’ll keep y’all informed (if I can remember!)”.

Wormwood

More recently wormwood oil has become available on the Internet as a “herbal dietary supplement”, although it is not clear what your diet is supposed to be lacking. Wormwood is not known for its vitamins. It also comes with assurances that it has been organically grown, which ought to be the least of anyone’s worries. At least one high quality brand is beautifully packaged, with a label that bears close relation to a sibling brand of wormwood-free pastis: so close, in fact, that punters might well sense an invitation to put the two together. Absinthe in America is now associated with the Gothic and Witchcraft sub-cultures, the latter being quietly solicited by wormwood oil marketing. We are told that absinthe was reputedly first prepared by witches, with some interesting etymologies: the Anglo-Saxon word wermode means “waremood” or “mind-preserver”, and wermod is Old English for “spirit mother”.

Thujone

Thujone has been getting its tentacles around more people with the practice of recreational wormwood abuse, which has been established in the States for some years. Obscure drugs were a part of hippy “head” culture (as in “head shops”, which would sell cigarette papers, Perspex water pipes, beads, T-shirts, psychedelic postcards and drug-oriented “commix” – there were several of these shops in the Portobello Road area of London, where they dragged on well past their heyday).

In 1973 Adam Gottlieb published Legal Highs, a handy little compendium well in tune with the banana-smoking tenor of its times. This was, after all, a period when somebody was said to have died after injecting peanut butter. Most of these things remained legal because nobody except a fool would ever think of taking them, but after an alphabetical catalogue of herbal horrors (random quote: “Effects: Vomiting, intoxication and increased heartbeat, followed by three days of drowsiness or sleep”) we finally come to Wormwood. The active ingredients are given as “Absinthine (a dimeric quaianolide), anabsinthin, and a volatile oil mainly consisting of thujone”. Curious heads are advised that the bitter essential oil, extracted into alcohol, can be combined with Pernod or anisette to make absinthe, and that the effects are narcotic. They are also warned that it may be habit-forming and debilitating, and that thujone may cause stupor and convulsions. It was available as a dried herb from the Magic Garden Herb Company in California, and in the form of Woodley Herber’s dried wormwood Absinthe mixture, “sold only for historical reference”.

Historical absintheurs

Baudelaire was a great explorer of the new sensations of urban life, of early ‘modernity’ and what we might now call alienation and neurosis, extending the domain of art and poetry to cover previously taboo subjects and find a new, strange beauty in them. He was a great exponent of dandyism, considered as an attitude or a philosophy rather than just a matter of clothing. He was also completely unimpressed by the idea of ‘progress’, hated the banality of modern life, and was inclined to believe in Original Sin. Late in his life he began to fear madness. He tried to give up drink and drugs and took up prayer with a new intensity, praying not only to God but to Edgar Allen Poe (whom he revered, and translated into French), as some people might pray to a saint to ‘intercede’ for them.

Isherwood writes, “Paris taught him his vices, absinthe and opium, and the extravagant dandyism of his early manhood which involved him in debt for the rest of his life.” Baudelaire also translated De Quincey’s Confessions of An English Opium Eater and wrote his won classic accounts of hashish, opium and alcohol in Les Paradis Artificiels and in his essay ‘Wine and Hashish Compared as a Means for the Multiplication of the Personality’. Jules Bertaut’s Le Boulevard includes a picture of Baudelaire rushing into a café, the Café de Madrid, and moving the water jug: “the sight of water upsets me”, he says, before sinking two or three absinthes with a “detached and insouciant” air.