My First Blog Post -or- Absinthe: A Review

A couple weeks ago, my pod-partner and I drank absinthe for the first time. I won't go into all the legal trouble that the "green fairy" has run into here in the 'States, but I've been looking forward to the day when I could finally taste this fabled drink. Years I've been waiting, my hopes soaring, imagining the hallucinogenic delights that awaited me thanks to the admissible thujone and wormwood levels. Visions of milky green draughts of magic. Did it live up to the hype?

No. Not really. While both Carl and I were expecting a soft, almost dream-like beverage best sipped slowly over a smoldering cigarette, what we got was very, very different.

The set-up alone was a hassle, as we didn't have the tools necessary for the professional absinthe connoisseur. In lieu of the slotted spoon - a wire strainer. The fountain dripping ice cold water - a water bottle sloppily poured. We did have sugar cubes, for all the difference that made.

What we ended up with was a cloudy, green, luke warm drink, that tasted like mint cough syrup, and begged to be swallowed slowly, if only because the alcohol content (62%) made gulping impossible. And there were grains of sugar piling on the bottom of the glass.

Suffice it to say that we were disappointed. This particular absinthe, reverse-engineered from an original bottle by T.A. Breaux, is the one I'd been waiting years to try. Maybe my hopes were just too high. Or maybe those unfortunate drinkers in bygone eras who supposedly went crazy from the drink were actually just mad with disappointment.