Chasing the Green Fairy

Image from Spirits of France 

Regular readers may recall I have recently made some absinthe. With the family all together on Mothers' Day I gave them all a taste and Sarah must have remembered what I told them about Chasing the Green Fairy.

A couple of parcels arrived from her for my birthday, one containing an ornate spoon, and the other some sugar cubes. So tonight I followed the ritual with my home-made absinthe...

I started dripping water on the sugar cubes. Not more absinthe as the photo at the top appears to show... the aim is to dilute the absinthe from it's 50% ABV.

The sugar cubes slowly dissolve.

The drips fall into the absinthe.

And here is the final result, ready to be stirred.

Delicious, and rather louche, I think. Thank-you Sarah. I could get used to this. I think I'll have to make some more absinthe!

By the way, I read here in Wikipedia... " Absinthe is bottled at a high level of alcohol, but it is usually diluted with water before it is drunk. Absinthe came from Val-de-Travers, Switzerland. It was very popular in late 19th and early 20th century France. Parisian artists and writers drank it. The romantic associations with the drink still lingers in popular culture. At the end of 1900 the French were drinking over 2 million litres of absinthe a year. By 1910 this had increased to 36 million litres. Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Oscar Wilde, Aleister Crowley, Erik Satie and Alfred Jarry were all known absinthe drinkers." A cool crowd to hang out with!