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Absinthe: the Green Fairy

Feb 26th, 2009 by

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Posted in Spirits

4 Responses to “Absinthe: the Green Fairy”

  1. DuneGuy says:
    February 27, 2009 at 6:23 am

    “But modern day science shows that thujone appears in drastically less proportions than originally predicted”

    Modern day “science” produced by whom? Answer: the modern day absinthe industry.

    Here are some alternative points of view:

    **”It will be like drinking decaffeinated coffee,” says Pierre-André Delachaux, a history professor. “I will keep on drinking illegal absinthe until the supply dries up, then I’ll switch to whisky.”

    “But the biggest controversy surrounding the liquor–once dubbed “one of the worst enemies of man”–is about not its resurgence but rather its authenticity. Enthusiasts claim the thujone-free brands, which contain less than 10 parts per million (p.p.m.) of the chemical, are made with the same relatively small amounts of thujone as the old brews. But scientists wrote in the British Medical Journal that absinthe bottled before 1900 packed up to 260 p.p.m. of thujone–which may not sound like much, but consider that only 15 parts per billion of lead in drinking water is enough to scare regulators. “They are playing pretend,” study co-author Wilfred Arnold says of the liquor’s new cheerleaders. “It is nothing like the old stuff.” Time Magazine

    Boston Herald:

    The manufacturers of “new absinthe” claim that they are in compliance with the European Commission ruling that no foodstuff should contain more than 9 ppm thujone. Perhaps to raise the titillation for the current product, and to increase sales, they now claim that the “old absinthe” also had very little thujone in it! Supposedly the current drink has very little of several other terpenoids that were part of “old absinthe” because the current producers have missed the importance of (or intentionally avoided) “steam distillation” which was key to the manufacture of “old absinthe.” Steam distillation greatly affects the composition of the batchwise distillate. Any analogy to fractional distillation (as in whisky) is totally inappropriate with regard to 19th century absinthe manufacture. The toxicity of thujone, or any other toxic compound, depends upon both the amount and the time. How much and how long. There is ample evidence to indicate that high doses of thujone, camphor, fenchone (and related compounds) over a short time evoke convulsions and hallucinations in experimental animals. To the best of my knowledge there are no published studies on the long-term effect of 9 ppm thujone. It has been shown that thujone, pinene, and camphor, as well as alcohol itself, are all porphyrogenic. An individual such as Vincent van Gogh with the underlying disease of acute intermittent porphyria would be more sensitive than the general population to these terpenoids, and to drinking all alcoholic beverages, but especially absinthe. Dr. Wilf. Arnold Westwood Hills Kansas

    “… However, in a 2000 study by UC Berkeley researchers Karin Hold, Nilantha Sirisoma, Tomoko Ikeda, Toshio Narahashi and John Casida, it was discovered that alpha-thujone affects a brain receptor that regulates excitation, re-opening the idea that absinthe has calculable effects on the brain”

    “It depends strictly on the concentration of active ingredients,” said Casida in a phone interview.

  2. Jüri says:
    October 9, 2009 at 4:51 am

    If I drink it, did i see a green little mans?

  3. Glenn Andersen says:
    June 7, 2010 at 3:41 am

    I agree that they have reduced the ingredients, I have yet to hallucinate. Now if someone over there would wake up and realize that absinthe is now allowed back in Canada, and, I might add, allowing three times the Thujone level which is allowed in the European community, I would love to see that.

  4. mcmeador says:
    October 21, 2012 at 10:06 pm

    “From Hell” more so depicted opium as the instigator of his visions (he was shown dripping laudanum onto his sugar cube before adding it to the absinthe in one scene).

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