The History of Absinthe

Series Summary

Vincent van Gogh. Pablo Picasso. Ernest Hemingway. Oscar Wilde. We could go on with this list of famous absinthe drinkers, but here at Expert Village, we don’t want to give you the impression that if you drink a few swigs of this mysterious green drink and you’ll be painting your own “Starry Night” or writing the next “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” The stuff was banned for good reason. Frenchman Jean Lanfray murdered his family on a green demon bender. (The courts blamed absinthe and Lanfray was set free.) Oscar Wilde discovered tulips growing on his legs after a dedicated drinking session. Emile Zola wrote of a bingeing streaker on the rue Saint-Martin who polkaed himself to death. Yes indeed, turn of the century Paris was a wild place, what with of all of the absinthe-induced hallucinations gallivanting about town. But this fun came to a end with the extensive banning of this drink in the early twentieth century. Within past decade, the green demon has make somewhat of a comeback in Europe, and in fact never was illegal in Spain or Portugal. But it is still illegal to buy it in the United States. However, you can legally make your own…

In this series of home brew videos, our experienced bartender Allen Gottfried tells you how to make your own absinthe. He begins by giving you a brief history of absinthe and then discusses how to filter it. Learn all of the ingredients you need and how to distill them. Not sure how to get that bright green color? Wondering how to flavor this exotic drink so it doesn’t taste like transmission fluid? Watch these videos and you will know. Just don’t sell the stuff or you could get into big trouble.

Video Transcript

"Hi. My name is Allen for Expert Village and today I'm going to discuss a controversial and banned alcohol commonly known as absinthe. Absinthe was invented in the late seventeen hundreds and it quickly became Europe's or one of Europe's most popular drinks. Now it was being produced in France and also Switzerland by a couple of different individuals and it actually became a very, very big and popular drink in France. Now the people enjoy it because of its psychoactive and hallucinogenic properties to it, mostly due to the wormwood content which was being produced and is one of the main ingredients in the absinthe. And this was very big for many years and then once the European prohibition rolled around, pretty much because of this, people were getting addicted to or so they were being said addicted to absinthe. Pretty much with this prohibition in Europe rolling around, the makers and the brewers of the absinthe pretty much put it to the side and said okay let's not do this anymore. And it's been many years and you could find it here and there in many European countries, but it was not big like it once was when it was first invented. Now being a couple of hundred years later, it's starting to regain some much needed drive, I guess and people really want to consume what was once invented back in the late seventeen hundreds. Now it's a really, really great drink. But again with the psycho active things, we might run into some of the same problems. Now of course the brewing process and the distillation process is a little bit different than it was back then. Maybe a little bit cleaner things like that, but you still have those certain chemicals in it."