Absinthe to hit the U.S. market again

According to this article in New York Magazine, Absinthe will be marketed again in the U.S. This bright green spirit has been banned in the U.S. since 1912. Absinthe cocktail recipes are included at the bottom of this article.

http://nymag.com/daily/food/2007/05/absint...od_when_it.html

Absinthe has been available in the US and Canada for a couple years now. In Canada for at least 4-5 years. But the Absinthe you can get has had the wormwood removed for the most part. So it is basically just a really expensive, and bad tasting alcohol.

http://www.gumbopages.com/food/beverages/absinthe.html

http://www.wormwoodsociety.org/laws.html

Here's another interesting article about it's connection to New Orleans and the other link is to Wormwood Society webpage which discuss the U.S. law on Absinthe.

The last I knew it was still illegal in the U.S. I'm glad they're going to start selling it there. I'm tired of smuggling bottles of it home for my friends.

That stuff is rocket fuel. I had some shots of it when I worked on an apple orchard in the Okanagan Valley a few years ago. The Portuguese owner poured us workers a few shots and we found ourselves crawling back to our apartments afterwards.

Well, you can buy it in Minneapolis and have been able to since at least ~2000.

I drink it from time to time...not bad.

I wonder if the stuff you have been able to buy over there is the real stuff, or some cut down version.

Weeelllll... being a liquor aficionado I have bought some stuff in the US that you might think is absinthe. Saw several brands. One was Absente... it has little or no wormwood.

Absinthe gets most of its flavor from the herbs used to make it, not from the wormwood. Kinda like a super strong gin (although that's a bad analogy) with higher alcohol content. I'm 99% sure that this alcohol in the article (and anything else you can buy in the US) is not full-strength stuff like you can get in Czech. For that matter, neither is what's sold in Germany -- I think most European countries have regulations about how much wormwood content is in the absinthe legally sold there. Probably what van Gogh and company drank would have knocked the socks off any brand you buy in an absinthe regulated country.

So, you have some guys marketing something called Absinthe but with little or zero wormwood / "fun" toxins left in it. Probably their big victory was to allow them putting the word absinthe on the label. But I bet it still tastes damn good!

Same brands, same alcohol percentage...same taste. The thujone level was in the range of what I've seen here as well.

...and one51: the old absinthe didn't have much wormwood, they've done studies.