The Absinthe Drip Cocktail Recipe

Absinthe, the drink of the —, the drink of poets and artists, and some say the drink that will drive you crazy, but I say not. Welcome to cocktail spirit from small screen network, I’m your host, Robert Hess. Absinthe, The Green Fairy, people have a lot of conceptions and misconception about what Absinthe is and is not. I’d like to briefly provide some education on what Absinthe is really all about. Now a lot of the propaganda we’ve been hearing over the last few years about the hallucinations and craziness and deaf facts and stuff like that about absinthe for the most part is all propaganda from the late 1800s. Back in those days Absinthe have been picked on no only by the Temperance Union who was trying to outlaw alcohol worldwide, but also by the wine industry who was just recovering their feet from the great big wine play that they had and they’re trying to recover and get their selves back up again, but they saw that Absinthe being so popular in France was stealing away from their market and a lot of the Absinthe back in those days was actually made of questionable quality, kerosene and junk like that, just all sorts of really —things, and so its probably a good thing that they can get Absinthe really carefully looked at. Unfortunately a lot of this revolved around thujone which is one of the ingredients that’s in wormwood which is one of the ingredients that is used to make Absinthe with. Real Absinthe however really doesn’t have hardly any thujone in it all. Thujone is a drug just like a lot of things are and it does have effects to the body, it can cause seizures if taken in high quantities and stuff like that and various other things, but there is so little thujone left in Absinthe that was made that there is going to be no effect whatsoever. It’s more of the alcohol in the Absinthe that’s going to cause any problem to people drinking it. Now Absinthe is illegal to manufacture or sell in the United States as well as almost worldwide. It has been available in Czech Republic for a long time. And it’s just now starting to come back in the European Union is being capable to sell and it’s being sold in Europe for a long time as well. Now a lot of the Absinthe you’re going to see on the market for sale either on the web, or in stores when you’re traveling to Europe and stuff like that, most of them I would say are of questionable quality. For the most part, any Absinthe coming out of Czech Republic is not what I would personally call a good quality Absinthe. Many of them are even absinthe but they’re not even close to Absinthe. There is more similar to what you might call a bathtub gin, in which you’re simply taking alcohol and adding oils of the herbs that are part of the absinthe into and the flavor is not in the same. Real Absinthe has to be distilled. You cannot make it at home, you have to take and start with a high proof alcohol, put in the various herbs that are a part of absinthe then distill it, and it’s in that distilling process that the thujone is actually ripped away from the end product. What comes out then is a very clear high proof spirit that then quickly dumps some additional herbs in and pull them back out again and that’s what adds that characteristics slightly greenish cooler to it. Now the proper way to serve the Absinthe is going to be and what I call an Absinthe drip. Now it uses ice water, sugar cubes, special spoon and usually a special glass as well. We have here an Absinthe drip fountain. This is a traditional style fountain, it’s actually a recreation, an authentic original Absinthe fountain. We have here a reproduction spoon as well as a reproduction glass. Now the fountain costs quite a bit and so I don’t expect people to think and go and buy a fountain like this. But the glasses and the spoons you can find around in various places. Actually a store downtown in Seattle that sells these glasses and these spoons can come with even some of the Absinthe substitute, you can take and find them, they might have special deals with it. That’s really kind of a fun ritual to do to actually do the Absinthe drip or even using an Absinthe substitute do this drip at home. A lot of people when they’re making Absinthe also they’ll take and do the thing with the sugar cube, where they put the sugar cube on top of the spoon, pour the Absinthe into the glass over top of the sugar cube which basically soaks up the Absinthe in the sugar cube. Since Absinthe is high alcohol content, it will burn quite readily, they’ll then light the sugar cube on fire and then as its burning, once it burns out they’ll then add the water to the drink and then drink it. The problem is that that’s not the right way to make Absinthe. The proper Absinthe script has never been done like that until around 1995 which is one of the Czech Republic Absinthe maker started doing that. And the reason they did that was because their Absinthe doesn’t what we call louche. Louche is when you add the cold water to the absinthe and it starts turning cloudy and that’s part of the whole process, the ritual of making an absinthe drip is watching that louche happen. Since it didn’t louche they need to come up with something else, and so they came up with this very dramatic flaming sort of thing. The problem with that is that destroys your spoon, the sugar cube caramelizes into a little tiny bubbles, that is floating inside the absinthe, and so it doesn’t actually sweetened the drink at all, so it doesn’t get any purpose whatsoever except for burnt sugar smell in the air, the destroyed spoon and sometimes a destroyed glass because the sugar crystal are going to take in and caramelize and stick to the glass itself. But like I said, you don’t really need to take and have this whole set up, if you don’t have anything at all, you could just use a standard ordinary glass, you could if you wish take whatever sort of orange strainer you will have, invert it over the glass and you could put the sugar cube there, you just want something so you can slowly drip cold water on the sugar cube and have it dissolved and fall into the glass below it. So a lot of different things can work there. But since the absinthe glass and spoon are relatively easy to find and fairly inexpensive, we’re going to go ahead and use that. So the process is you first take a dose of absinthe, now this is a real absinthe, it’s made in France. This is one of the Jade look here, a brand of absinthe, it is one of the finest commercial absinthe currently available. We pour it in the glass and most if not all absinthe glasses will have what they call a dosing mark. The dosing mark in this case is the little indentation around the base of the glass. That tells me that’s how far I want to pour into the glass to get the right amount of absinthe. We then put the spoon on the top and take one or perhaps two sugar cubes depending of what you like, some people actually don’t like sugar at all. They like to flavor all by itself, and then we take something you can pour cold water at it, so here is just a small coffee pitcher that I fill full of ice and water and now we’re just going to slowly pour this over top of the sugar cube. First I’m just going to wet the sugar cube down to start getting the dissolving sort of stuff down, so it really will dissolve as well as possible once it gets inside of the glass. And as I pour, you should notice this absinthe which is clear right now, will gradually cloud up and that’s when it wails there in suspension falling out and actually clouding up the drink. So you see the sugar cube is now almost totally dissolved. The absinthe in color is getting a milky opulent in color, still is slightly greenish tinge. The sugar cube is now fully dissolved in the glass and the finish pouring of water to get that to what I feel is the right mark. What I’m using as a mark now for the water on the glass is the small little carved scallops on the side of the glass, and that tells me when I’m at the right level. Well after about a three to one ratio, three parts cold water to one part absinthe. We then take the spoon which has a nice little triangular shape at the bottom, and use that to stir it down to the very bottom of the glass to take any of the sugar that might leave there can bring that out. Now being both cold water and alcohol, any sugar that still down there really not going to dissolve that well. One time I had a sugar cube fall straight into the absinthe and I tried breaking it up and get it dissolved, and it took forever for me to get that sugar cube to break up when it was in the alcohol absinthe. So this now is a traditional absinthe drip made with real absinthe, the real way.