The Dedalus Book of Absinthe

by Baker, Phil

  The addition of sugar gives the drinking of absinthe a ritualistic feel, similar to using intravenous drugs. Both involve spoons, fire and a little patience: similar means to a not completely dissimilar end.

  And secondly, “as far as I can remember, I have never had hallucinations while drinking it, but it does produce incredibly vivid dreams. They are invariably surreal and obscene.”

  The most significant part of the piece, however, may have been the little box at the end:

  Since coming across it by accident in 1993, I have had a steady supply, thanks to friends and Mr Hill himself. Call the Idler if you are interested in importing it.

  It was The Idler’s own founders, as it turned out – editor Tom Hodgkinson and art director Gavin Pretor-Pinney – who would share Moore’ s interest in importing it. In late summer 1998 the three of them met businessman George Rowley, who had experience in importing Czech beers and spirits and had been thinking of importing Hill’s, with whom he had already made separate contact. Radomil Hill urged them to form a single company before he would deal with them commercially, and so ‘Green Bohemia’ was founded. In time their absinthe importing would become so successful that The Idler men would have little time for producing the very excellent The Idler, letting it dwindle from a regular magazine to an occasional annual that finally reappeared after a longish break. Long known to be dangerous, absinthe had nearly killed The Idler.

  Absinthe was re-launched in Britain in December 1998, attracting widespread and excitable Press coverage. “Now”, wrote the broadsheet The Guardian, “to the horror of alcohol awareness campaigners, a British company has secured an importation contract with a tiny Czech distillery after discovering that the drink was never formally prohibited in this country.” The Daily Mail, the most respectable of the tabloids, ran a shock-horror story which compared absinthe to using vodka, cannabis and LSD all at the same time, much to the gratification of Green Bohemia. “You can’t buy that kind of publicity”, said a happy Mr Hodgkinson.

  Green Bohemia’s formidably hip publicity machine was able to run pieces on its ‘Hall of Fame’ celebrity customers, including their first ever customer, American actor Johnny Depp. In Britain to shoot the movie Sleepy Hollow, Depp wanted to get some absinthe to drink with Hunter S. Thompson, whom he had played in the film of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Suede launched their 1999 album Head Music with absinthe at London club China White, and other music industry customers ran the gamut from rapper Eminem to Goth Marilyn Manson. Select magazine ran a regular feature called ‘Our Absinthe Friends’ which invited bands to get drunk on absinthe – supplied by Moore – and then recorded their ramblings as they fell to pieces.

  Suddenly people were thirsty for the word absinthe, with a distant cultural memory of it as “mysterious, tantalising, the quintessential decadent fin-de-siècle drink”. But in other respects Hill’s success was surprising, since it was an open secret that it was not particularly pleasant. “Horrible” said one attempted drinker: “a powerfully cloying smell and taste of marshmallows, combined with flavours of cough mixture, herbs and vanilla essence, and fierce alcohol.” The Times described it tasting of “aquavit on steroids with a hint of singed hair, leaving a strong anaesthetic aftertaste like eating a million of those round pink Liquorice Allsorts everyone avoids.” “I have never drunk Vosene shampoo before,” said a Daily Telegraph journalist in Prague, “but it must be pretty close to this.”

  A drinker in Prague hit the spot with a revealing comment about Bohemian-style absinthes “You drink absinthe to get drunk quickly – only a masochist would add water and make it a long lasting drink” (good French-style absinthe, in contrast, makes an excellent long drink). Faced with the facts that Hill’s is both intensely intoxicating and intensely unpalatable to most people, the logical answer was to drink it mixed and masked. Green Bohemia embarked on a groovy promotion of cocktail culture, publishing recipes for newly invented cocktails containing Hill’s, such as the ‘Psycho Surfer’, the ‘Green Rose’, the ‘Flaming Absinthe Passion’, the ‘Six Pack’, the ‘Vincent Van G’, the ‘China Blue’, ‘The Bohemian’ and various other luxury horrors, several of which were particularly popular in the North of England.

  Intoxication was the key, leaving Green Bohemia to strike a careful balance. On the one hand they were genuinely responsible, and issued a guideline that no drinker should be served with more than two absinthes in one night (a directive without precedent in the drinks industry). And on the other hand, everyone knew what the point was. Who drinks to stay sober? Actor Keith Allen, asked for his opinion of Hill’s at Green Bohemia’s Groucho Club launch, reportedly laughed like a maniac and announced, “It works!”

  The French and Swiss were not so amused by the so-called absinthe revival in Britain. “This English [i.e. Czech] stuff isn’t absinthe”, said French absinthe expert Francois Guy. His family had started making absinthe at Pontarlier in 1870, and he now runs a distillery – of other drinks, absinthe still being illegal in France – and an absinthe museum there. “It’s disgusting, alien rubbish. How dare they steal our name?” “It is worse than lamentable”, said Jocelyn Parisot, a manager at the Guy factory: “If Baudelaire and Rimbaud had to drink that Czech stuff, they would be turning in their graves.”

  One of the most formidable French critics was Marie- Claude Delahaye, France’s foremost authority on absinthe, who in 1994 opened The Absinthe Museum at Auvers-sur- Oise, where Van Gogh is buried. Delahaye’s interest in the subject began when she found a strange pierced and plant- shaped spoon in a Paris flea market in 1981 – an absinthe spoon – and she began collecting absinthe related items, leading to several books on the subject. These have been oriented towards collectable artefacts and paraphernalia (she was already the author of a book on babies’ milk bottles) as well as to poets and artists. Something of the appeal of absinthe bric à brac for her, as she explains in her book Histoire de la Fée verte, is to recapture the unhurried and leisurely quality of bygone absinthe drinking, whether in a café or under shady trees in the Midi within, “un climat de farniente, de douceur de vivre.”

  Delahaye objected strenuously that Czech ‘absinth’ was not the real thing, leading Green Bohemia to launch a French- style absinthe with her co-operation in July 2000. Unlike Hill’s, this brand – La Fée, with the distinctive eye on the bottle – is more than pleasant enough to make a long drink just with water. (“Cloudy, green, full of the flavour of anise and really quite delicious if you like that sort of thing… It is very, very like Pernod except it is stronger and not yellow.”) Nothing if not a purist, Delahaye has strong reservations about mixing it with anything else.

  The launch of La Fée – again at the Groucho Club, like the launch of Hill’s – was accompanied by lavish publicity. The masterstroke of marketing was The Absinthe Bus, a classic London double-decker (a circa 1960 ‘Routemaster’, with the open platform and stairway at the back) painted green. This new incarnation of the Charenton Omnibus toured as far afield as the North of England and the major cities of Scotland, where the harder and more Russian-style drinking culture had already made Hill’s popular, introducing punters to the smoother style of La Fée. Fitted with a well-appointed lounge-style cocktail bar upstairs, the absinthe bus announced various destinations at the front including ‘Oblivion’ and the more optimistic ‘Utopia’.

  Green Bohemia sponsored the drinks bash after the 2000 Turner Prize – the year that Wolfgang Tillmans won – taking the winner and runners up to a party at Shoreditch Town Hall and plying them with La Fée. Damien Hirst had already been reported as an absinthe enthusiast, and was said to be considering a series of absinthe-inspired works.

  Absinthe was now at the cutting edge of millennial party culture, and it had come to mean becoming intoxicated as easily and quickly as possible. It was a development that would have seemed strange to the drug culture of the late Sixties and early Seventies, when the enjoyment of alcohol, especially by the young, was regarded as rather squalid. But now
absinthe’s allegedly drug-like properties gave the E-generation an alibi to enjoy getting drunk.

  Green Bohemia’s upbeat and witty public image strategies promoted absinthe as the spirit of “freedom.” This neatly combined the new freedom of post-Iron Curtain Prague, and laissez-faire economics, with the disinhibiting effects of getting totally inebriated (a kindred spirit drink, Pernod, had already been advertised with the equally neat slogan of “Free the spirit”). Absinthe continues to go from strength to strength in the UK, where the absinthe scene has spanned a similar social mix to ‘Brit Art’, i.e. proletarians larging it and public school wide boys moving and shaking the whole business. Unlike the more Gothic significations that cling to absinthe in America, the British absinthe revival is by far the most positive image that absinthe has ever had.

  There were only a few dissenting voices from all this jollity, one of them being Nicholas Monson, forty-three year old heir to the 11th Baron Monson. Old Etonian Monson became embroiled in a drink-driving case in 1999 after drinking two glasses of absinthe in a Chelsea bar, and duly lost his licence. But he was prepared to fight against the verdict and appeal, “on the grounds that bars shouldn’t be serving poison without a warning.” “The Government should make absinthe illegal”, said Monson, whose father is President of the Society for Individual Freedom. “This drink has been proven to send people absolutely doolally.” Monson admitted drinking two but said he couldn’t remember if he might have had three, and compared absinthe’s impact to mixing double strength vodka with cannabis. His barrister claimed Monson had a legitimate case, “because he is entitled to expect when he goes on to a licensed premises and is served a drink that he is not going to be ‘poisoned’. This drink clearly has mind altering properties.”

  The Home Office had already tested absinthe to determine whether its allegedly hallucinogenic properties made it illegal under the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, and found that they did not. “It is no more dangerous than any other substance that can be misused”, said a spokesman. From one angle, the Government had reason to be grateful to the absinthe importers. Since taxation is not only a way of raising money but also a means of discreet social control, the exceptional alcoholic strength of absinthe has merited a discouraging and punitive tax rating, with around sixteen pounds out of a forty pound purchase price going to the State.

  Despite the revenue involved, Home Office Minister George Howarth told journalists that the reappearance of absinthe was a “cause for deep concern” and that “We shall be keeping a very close eye on this to see if sales take off.” The crucial issue – the one which had already led to its banning in France and its non-banning in Britain – was whether it would spread to the working classes, the ‘lager louts’ of the popular press, or even to the ‘glue sniffers’ and solvent abusers. Meanwhile, underlining Green Bohemia’s laissez-faire principles, importer Tom Hodgkinson went as far as to say that part of the “fascination” of absinthe, and indeed one of its “principal attractions”, was that in drinking it “one is cocking a snook at New Labour’s nanny culture.” Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, was reported in the Daily Telegraph to have let it be known that “he is keeping a close eye on the matter and if it becomes popular, he will ban it.”

  Chapter Ten

  The Rituals of Absinthe

  The safest way to prepare an absinthe: a sonnet by ‘Valentin’. Copyright Marie-Claude Delahaye.

  Like opium smoking, Holy Communion, and the Japanese tea ceremony, the word “ritual” often recurs when people talk about absinthe: “the ritual sets it apart”; “the beauty of the ritual”; “There is a certain romance in the ritual. The ritual always draws people back to it.” As we have seen, John Moore noted “a ritualistic feel, similar to using intravenous drugs” when he encountered absinthe in Prague, while George Saintsbury relished “the ceremonial and etiquette which make the proper fashion of drinking it delightful to a man of taste.”

  Absinthe rituals have involved both fire and water. The recent revival was accompanied by a fire ritual from Prague, for drinking East European absinthe. A shot of absinthe is poured into a glass, and a teaspoonful of sugar is dipped into it. The alcohol-soaked sugar is lit with a match, and allowed to burn until it bubbles and caramelises. The spoon of melted sugar is then plunged into the absinthe and stirred in, which often has the incidental effect of setting the absinthe alight. An equal measure, or more, of water is then poured in from a jug or a second glass, dousing any flame. Setting the absinthe alight in the glass has the effect of slightly toning down its excessive alcoholic strength, which can only be a good thing for the premises serving it, but the main feature of the whole affair is simply its novelty. It also recalls American fraternity drinking customs with flaming Southern Comforts and the like. There is altogether little to be said for this performance, and it would have been regarded as an abomination in nineteenth-century France.

  The classic method involves absinthe and water. When water is added to a good absinthe it can be seen to go cloudy, or to “louche” as the French has it (literally to become unclear, with connotations of suspicion and ambiguity). The absinthe whitens and becomes opaque when the water upsets the balance of alcohol and herbal matter, making the essential oils precipitate out of the alcoholic solution into a colloidal suspension. This “louche” was highly valued by absinthe drinkers, and to meet the demand for it makers of bad absinthe would add poisonous additives such as antimony to enhance the effect.

  Broadly, a measure of absinthe was poured into an absinthe glass, which – in its most standard form – flares upwards from a round foot, like an ice cream sundae glass, and typically has a fat bead instead of a wine-glass style stem. A special pierced spoon was then balanced across the glass, with a lump of sugar on it; and cool water was poured over the sugar and into the glass. As an old Pernod advert instructed drinkers, “Pernod Fils’ absinthe can be taken with or without sugar; pour it into a large glass, add iced water very slowly; to sugar it, use the spoon as shown in the picture.” It is straightforward enough, but this simple act was capable of an extraordinary degree of minor refinement and savoir faire.

  First of all comes the correct paraphernalia. The pierced spoon came in enough elegant varieties to fill whole books for collectors, and more obscure devices were also available to hold the sugar, such as little towers or funnels that sat on top of the glass. The glasses also varied, some of them having the pleasing refinement of an egg-like cavity at the base to measure the correct dose of absinthe (‘dose’ being another word that recurs when people talk of absinthe: a drug-like word that nobody would use for whisky). Glasses could also be acid etched to the dose level, or marked in some other way.

  A jug of water would be to hand, sometimes brand-named, and in some establishments a tap ‘fountain’ would be on the bar. The jug would have a thin spout, to permit a fine enough trickle. And it is from now on that the narcissism of minor differences really comes into play, although the essence of the whole business – to cut a long story short – is really just about not sploshing the water in all at once.

  It would have been an insult for the waiter to prepare a keen absintheur’s absinthe. The judicious preparation was half the pleasure, as the drinker reached and approved the exact degree of opalescence in the glass. Careful dripping would allow the drinker to watch individual drops make smoky trails in the drink, with the same concentration that some people put into blowing smoke rings. The drinker could, in the language of the day, frapper or étonner the absinthe (knock on it or even surprise it, like a living thing), or indeed battre it (beat it) by letting the drops one by one fall from on high, all having the effect, eventually, of diluting it.

  Dripping water on it from on high was something of an affectation. A contemporary cartoon shows an old French colonial, wearing only his trunks, his medal and his pith helmet with a little flag on top, sitting before a table with his absinthe on it. Up in the tree above him is a little African boy, wearing a fez, who drips water from a bot
tle drop by drop into the absinthe. By contrast Charles Cros, in ‘La Famille Dubois’, has a character – after anouncing that it’s half past four and time to talk – put an absinthe before his friend and pour a thin stream of water into his glass while explaining how to prepare a good absinthe: “There is no need to pour it from on high (that’s just a preconception). It must go gently, gently, and then all at once flouf! One has a purée parfaite.”

  Height may have been optional, but slowness was the essence of the performance. Raymond Queneau’s The Flight of Icarus drags the instructive pouring of absinthe out to several pages, as the beginner learns not to just drown it†. There is another atmospheric account in Marcel Pagnol’s The Time of Secrets, where, unusually, it is something of a family affair:

  The poet’s eye suddenly gleamed.

  Then, in deep silence, began a kind of ceremony.

  He set the glass – a very big one – before him after inspecting its cleanliness. Then he took the bottle, uncorked it, sniffed it, and poured out an amber- coloured liquid with green glints to it. He seemed to measure the dose with suspicious attention for, after acareful check and some reflection, he added a few drops.

  He next took up from the tray a kind of small silver shovel, long and narrow, in which patterned perforations had been cut.

  He placed this contrivance on the rim of the glass like a bridge, and loaded it with two lumps of sugar.

  Then he turned towards his wife: she was already holding the handle of a ‘guggler’, that is to say a porous earthenware pitcher in the shape of a cock, and he said: