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A friend of mine brought me back a bottle of absinthe from Amsterdam. It is from the Abtshof distillery and is 66% alcohol. He told me to drink it on a spoon with a sugar cube. Any other ideas? Also, if you have drank the real stuff before, not the stuff they sell in the U.S., have you actually ever seen the "green fairy"? How much do you have to drink?
Okay, there's a lot of misinformation in this post already. Let's break it down.
1) Absinthe is usually prepared by pouring chilled water over a sugar cube into the absinthe. The sugar cube sits on a slotted spoon designed for this purpose. Since absinthe is a liquor, not a liqueur, it's sugar content is low and its proof is high, so this little ritual helps solve both problems.
2) The psychoactive effects of absinthe have been enormously exaggerated over the last century. In truth, it will not noticeably impair you any more or less than any other strong alcoholic beverage.
3) One of the key flavoring ingredients in absinthe is wormwood, which has been used a spice and a medicinal plant for centuries. While pure wormwood oil is poisonous, the level that is used in absinthe is completely harmless. Saying that an ingredient in absinthe is poison is like saying aspirin is poisonous because if you eat 12 pounds of willow-tree bark, you'll die.
4) It's not the case that the absinthe sold in the US isn't "real." First, there is no standard definition of absinthe among anyone involved in its manufacture, certainly not compared to other liquors like bourbon or scotch, whose definitions are tightly controlled. But the only firm regulation on US absinthe is that it contain low amounts of thujone, which the FDA regards as a dangerous substance.
5) All alcoholic beverages contain ethanol.
Once again, please disregard informer_220's misinformation. The myths that absinthe contained any psychotropic substance, poison, or methanol in any greater amounts than any other alcohol have been enormously exaggerated, and for some reason, no amount of scientific study will dispel them. It seems even the masters of alcohol documentaries, the Germans, have fallen victim. There has never -- repeat, NEVER -- been any evidence that absinthe contained high levels of opium, copper, thujone, peyote, cocaine, wormwood. Anything to the contrary is pure hearsay, rumor, or outright lies.
Please see the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry's publication of a the definitive study of the makeup of pre- and post-ban absinthes for an exhaustive amount of evidence: http://www.oxygenee.net/JAFC-Vintage-Preban-Absinthe.pdf
nowadays you cant exactly see the green fairy because the absinthe is pure and cant accidentally kill you, like in the 1800's where a different type of alcohol was used that could blind you... ethanol I think... and the main ingridient is missing...poison... thats right absinthe was made with a type of poison... and nowadays it isnt anymore...
if you google around youll find some ways of drinking absinthe...
Absinthe became popular during a time period when wine vineyards were suffering from a severe decrease in production.
When the vineyards began to flourish again, they threw out a lot of false information about absinthe to deter people from drinking it. As a result, the majority of people returned to drinking wine again.
remind me to never watch german documentarys about alcohol ever again... but the fact is in the olden days absinthe was made illegally using methanol and opium based poison which was distributed as "original"... sorry bout the typo seems the J on my keyboard isnt the only one broken... stupid m...
If you want to know what it will TASTE like... simple... it tastes like Jägermeister... which tastes like liquorice... which I find repulsive.
I've had "real" absinthe, and I would advise you to listen to Mikeh.
