Our last afternoon in New Orleans found Michael Graves and I drinking absinthe around the corner from Faulkner’s house. It was early November — the sunny, dry sort of day that lends itself to open-air alcohol consumption, a cultural staple of the Big Easy.
A professionally trained chef, Mike is the food guy to my booze guy. The two of us had consumed a lot of both this weekend, so that day we took it easy, and only started drinking after breakfast. Considering what we were drinking, this was probably a wise move. Pirates Alley Cafe specializes in absinthe, the preferred poison of Van Gogh, Verlaine, and a few other tortured French artists, a coterie with which I’m perhaps too eager to associate.
Our bartender, dressed as a pirate, poured a dose of the dark green liquor into two stemmed glasses, which she positioned under the closed spigots of an absinthe fountain. Across the rim of each glass she placed a slotted spoon, and upon each spoon she put a sugar cube. The bartender then set the spigots to dripping, and Mike and I watched as the water from the fountain slowly dissolved the sugar cubes, filling the glasses and louching the absinthe — turning it a cloudy green-white hue. While the aesthetics of absinthe drinking are undoubtedly half the fun, the beverage itself is delicious — the complexity of the botanicals vivified by the addition of the sugar and water.
Sweet yet bitter, smooth yet potent, Lucid Absinthe is the real deal: thick, green, and, at a whopping 124-proof, not for the faint of liver. As per the hallmark of a true absinthe, Lucid receives its jade hue not from artificial coloring, but from fennel, anise, and that most unfairly demonized ingredient — Grande Wormwood. Temperance fanatics blamed thujone, a chemical compound found in wormwood, for seizures, hallucinations, and a host of social ills caused by absinthism (an especially evil subset of alcoholism). Prohibitionists successfully banned the liquor in 1912, although the amount of thujone a person would have to consume to incur seizures and hallucinations (though perhaps not social ills) is far above that found in any bottle of absinthe produced since the ban or before it. Fortunately, absinthe is back on the U.S. market today, and can be enjoyed in bars and alleys across the nation.
Check out Lucid Absinthe at http://www.drinklucid.com/, and Pirates Alley Cafe at http://www.piratesalleycafe.com/
Leave a Reply