The return of absinthe: What I learned on a green fairy bender
Absinthe is back on the menu. We sent Kyle MacNeill on a pub crawl of the best places to drink the green fairy to see if it lives up to its fearsome reputation
It’s five o’clock somewhere! By that, I mean that’s the literal time where I am, although for a second I’m not sure where that is. My head feels like it’s been used as a cocktail shaker. I squint and attempt to focus: Hotel Cafe Royal… I’m still in Hotel Cafe Royal.
A nice man is pouring me a glass of poison. He suspends a silver slotted spoon onto the rim of the goblet before carefully balancing a brown sugar cube on top. Then, with a flourish, he turns on the tap of an ornate miniature fountain. Ice water drips onto the sugar, which dissolves gradually, turning the glass cloudy. A quick stir, then a long sip.
It tastes like sin itself, a Dantian thimble of hell.
The toxin in question is, of course, absinthe. That 70-or-so per cent light green spirit made from grand wormwood that smacks of aniseed. As history has it, it’s revered by both hedonists and bohemian artists – is there a difference, after all?
I’ve only had it once before, when I was 15, at a sleepover. While one friend furiously flicked through some rather choice TV channels, another whipped out a bottle of Fairy Liquid-green Absente. It’s a naff brand known for its artificial colouring and 3D Van Gogh bottle. One time, I accidentally drank engine coolant at a house party and I’d say both memories taste pretty similar.
Anyway, absinthe is now enjoying a new chapter in London thanks to some slightly more mature drinkers and bartenders looking for a new buzz. Sales are up by 40 to 50 per cent in the UK. All this calls for a proper absinthe adventure – one without Babestation on in the background.
I start the Absinthe crawl at 2pm, at The Last Tuesday Society, a gothic bar on Hackney’s Mare Street that’s at the vanguard of absinthe experimentation. I’m sitting next to Ali Crawbuck, an American art historian who founded the establishment in 2016 with her partner Rhys Everett to complement The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, a collection of macabre oddities downstairs. “Make sure you have some stodge,” she warns when I tell her about my planned escapade.
She sets up my first fountain of the day, pours me a glass and recounts its history.
Although disputed, it’s likely that wormwood-flavoured wine was first used medicinally in ancient Egypt. But it wasn’t until 1792 that apothecarist Dr. Pierre Ordinaire first created a tonic using fifteen botanicals (including the now-signature flavours of star anise, liquorice and fennel) and prescribed it as a panacea for almost any ailment.
By the late 1800s, it was the drink of choice for washed-up artists in Paris, with 220 million litres a year produced in France at its peak. After a string of murders in Switzerland attributed to ‘absinthe madness’, it was banned in most European countries (but not the UK) for the best part of a century.
Fast-forward to the 1990s, and it began to enjoy a revival of sorts in Eastern Europe, where it was freshly legalised. But producers were reverse engineering the recipes, adding green food colouring to make it look like, as Crawbuck quips, “very vibrant mouthwash”. Worse still for purists, they did away with the spoon-and-sugar ritual and began to set it on fire instead to add a sense of theatre.
I finish my absinthe slushy in the museum downstairs and start to spin-out at the stuffed two-headed lambs, pickled brains in jars and sadistic sex toys
Travelling to France and Switzerland to sample the real deal in the mountains, Crawbuck and Everett started to import quality absinthe in the 2000s and amassed the largest collection in the UK. Of course, Brexit and Covid screwed everything up, which is why they began producing their own, based on antiquated recipes, in the Devil’s Botany distillery a few miles away in Leyton.
Back at The Last Tuesday Society, I quickly realise that my eyes are bigger than my liver. Offered a taster of the bar’s various, experimental absinthes — including a chocolate-and-brandy number and a pina colada slushy with a glace cherry — it’s all too easy to force the medicine to go down with a lot of sugar.
I finish my slushy in the museum downstairs and start to spin-out at the stuffed two-headed lambs, pickled brains in jars and sadistic sex toys. A burning question before I go: will it actually make me trip? Sadly, science has long debunked this myth. “Absinthe was never hallucinogenic,” Crawbuck says. Still, myth abounds. Sup enough of this sap and perhaps I really will see the Green Fairy, absinthe’s mystical totem.
Bidding farewell to Crawbuck, I head to the beating heart of the absinthe revival: Soho. Time for another glass of hard liquorice. I make my way to Oxford Street, gripping the handrail on the tube like I’m at the front of a rollercoaster.
My next port of call is the Thin White Duke, a recording studio and cocktail bar riffing off David Bowie’s 1970s alter ego. It’s run by Giovanni Almonte, a charismatic musician and bartender from New York. I try a cocktail called “…Away”, made from pensador mezcal, yellow chartreuse, luxardo maraschino, absinthe and lime, attempting not to slur my words.
Almonte first encountered absinthe in 2006 in Zurich. “It was the day that Gnarls Barkley released Crazy. I bought the CD, a bottle of absinthe and was just by myself in this hotel room. I drank half the bottle, just tripping on Gnarls Barkley, bro. Imagine. I was flying,” he says, eyes glazing over. I find it hard to imagine tripping on Gnarls Barkley, but my head does a nod. Almonte believes absinthe induces a special high. “It’s different: floaty and airy. More of an upper than a downer.” I get that. I feel more like I’m on an edible rather than a lot of ethanol: light-headed and giddy.
Dabbling in the absinthe world back in New York at a bar called Elsa, Almonte got hooked on the ritual — something other drinks don’t really offer. “You don’t see leprechauns when you have beer,” he says. After moving to the UK with a desire to open his own bar, Almonte ended up stumbling across an online absinthe seminar Crawbuck was hosting and they became friends.
Now, with The Thin White Duke, Almonte is trying to bring back the “Green Hour” – a Parisian tradition that saw punters put away fountains of absinthe after work.
Almonte needs to prepare a private party for a member of international royalty so I leave sometime in the early evening and slalom past some sober, slightly bemused commuters to Hotel Cafe Royale for a drink in its opulent Green Bar, the Rolls Royce of the absinthe world. The storied guesthouse, opened in 1865, has seen the likes of Oscar Wilde and Charles Dickens sway through its doors to dance with the devil.
Here I meet Matteo Carreta, director of beverages, for a glass of Jade 1901, a top-of-the-range French absinthe. I thought it would be hard to discern what makes one absinthe good and another bad – they are, of course, all evil – but this stuff is creamy and dangerously moreish.
Carreta emphasises the social aspect of absinthe, painting a picture of artists congregating around a slowly-dripping fountain. “If you’re discussing something romantic and esoteric, it gives you time to chat,” he says. He’s an expert in the distillation process and knows how to achieve the perfect syrup. I try my best to absorb it all, flitting in and out of socially acceptable lucidity. “Absinthe is a muse,” he says, explaining that people still come to the Green Bar to tick it off their list, like going to the Ritz for their Crepe Suzette or, more recently, the Devonshire for a Guinness. “It’s special. There is meaning behind it.”
But why is this most illustrious distillate haunting the zeitgeist again now? For Crawbuck, it’s a successor to the ginnaisance of yesteryear. “It’s a natural progression. People are interested in botanical spirits,” she says. Plus, with squeezed budgets, people want an experience when they go out boozing. “They want to find drinks with a story.” The bubble, though, may burst at some point. Carreta tells me that The Green Bar is set to pare back on its absinthe menu to make way for a more varied offering. Perhaps featuring bottles that couldn’t double up as hand sanitizer.
Time to bounce. I’m at the wafer-thin-mint stage of absinthe indulgence. But I signed up for a Wilde time so I float down the road to nearby jazz age speakeasy Nightjar for another. The security guard radios down to ask whether it’s OK to let me in but there’s only one other person there when I’m finally let downstairs. It crosses my mind that I might look as drunk as I feel. But any inhibitions melt away with the wave of the Green Fairy’s magic wand.
Perusing the absinthe menu, I opt for a fittingly named potion: Death In the Afternoon. A slender glass of absinthe and champagne with a twist of orange soon arrives. I knock it back in an unchic fashion.
By the time I step back out into a balmy Soho evening, I’m properly sledgehammered. I’ve drunk a classic absinthe, a chocolate one, a rose one, a slushied one, a mezcal one, a fancy French one and a champagne one, in that order. By a conservative estimate that’s half a bottle of the green stuff. I run a quick cognition test on myself: my name’s Kyle, it’s May and the President of the United States is Donald Trump. Definitely room for another drink, then.
Crawbuck mentioned the French House as a past den of absinthe inequity (alas, no longer) so I traipse there for a half pint of Meteor, chasing down a day’s worth of absinthe with 284ml of frothy lager. I leave in a trance.
Who knows if the revival will endure, I think, as I glide back to Victoria Station, suffering from what doctors might term ‘anise reflux’. The liquorice taste won’t shift from the back of my throat. But while I might feel all sorts of dizzy, I get the attraction. There’s something alluring about a drink with this much lore, an enchanting liquid steeped in history, an enigma, the elixir of the Green Fairy herself. Now if I could just find my way home…