This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode Absinthe: The World’s Most Dangerous Drink?, first released on October 15, 2024. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

[GASTROPOD THEME]

CHRISTIAN: It was the perfect plan. I was to audition for Satine and I would taste my first glass of…. absinthe.

[TRIPPY MUSIC]

FAIRY: I am the Green Fairy!

SINGERS: The hills are alive! With the sound of music…

LIANE HANSEN: Picasso sipped it, Oscar Wilde compared it to a sunset. And Ernest Hemingway wrote in a letter: Got tight last night on absinthe. Did knife tricks.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Ooooh, absinthe. The most dangerous drink in the world, amirite?

CYNTHIA GRABER: Well, a lot of governments have certainly thought so, because they tried to keep all of us from drinking it for nearly a century.

TWILLEY: But they can’t stop us! Or really anyone these days. We of course, are Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I’m Nicola Twilley.

GRABER: And I’m Cynthia Graber, and first, really, what is this magical, mysterious drink? Why was it ever banned, and if it was dangerous enough to be banned why did it become legal again?

TWILLEY: Will drinking it really make you hallucinate and murder people or paint masterworks and write epic poetry?

GRABER: And is the absinthe you can find in bars today the same spirit that Oscar Wilde was sipping more than a century ago?

TWILLEY: Buckle up, kids this episode we’re taking a deep dark draught of absinthe and seeing whether we live to tell the tale. But first: it’s time for what is becoming a biannual tradition: Ask Gastropod, the episode in which we get to the bottom of the weird food questions bothering you. We’re taking your questions for our new Ask Gastropod episode right now: email us at contact at gastropod dot com with the topic or question you’re curious about by November 15, and maybe we’ll answer it on air!

GRABER: In the past you’ve asked us to uncover the history of hush puppies, the difference between A1 and A2 milk, and whether white chocolate is actually chocolate. What rabbit holes will you send us down next? We can’t wait to find out!

TWILLEY: Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.

[MUSIC]

RAIL: Well, so absinthe is a, either a dark green or a clear liquor.

STUDER: It’s a distilled spirit, made with a variety of different herbs.

GRABER: The first voice you heard is Evan Rail, he’s a journalist and the author of the new book The Absinthe Forger.

TWILLEY: And that second voice—well, As it turns out there’s another new book about absinthe. It’s called The Hour of Absinthe: the Cultural History of France’s Most Notorious Drink. And it’s by the historian Nina Studer.

GRABER: Evan and Nina are our guides to this dark green, or clear, aniseed flavored herb spirit this episode—they will be initiating us into the mysterious and a little confusing beverage.

RAIL: It’s often thought of as a liqueur. But it’s not a liqueur because it’s not sweetened. It does have a certain sweetness to both the aroma and the taste though. But that’s really your mind tricking you. It’s not really sugar. It’s things that smell and taste like sweet things.

STUDER: So these range from fennel, aniseed, to cinnamon, coriander, lemon balm, all kinds of different herbs. They are turned into essential oils. And these are then introduced into the drink before the drink is distilled a second time.

TWILLEY: Like Nina says, individual distillers can put all sorts of herbs into their absinthe. But there are always three main ones: aniseed, which is sometimes called anise, fennel and wormwood.

RAIL: Anise and fennel are similar. They’re, they’re licorice-y, aromatic, bright, spring like aromas. Wormwood is incredibly bitter. It has a particular taste of its own, that is really unusual, that I wasn’t expecting when I first tasted, or smelled it.

GRABER: You listeners might remember that Nicky and I are already personally familiar with wormwood. We had the great fortune—or rather misfortune—of tasting leaves from a wormwood plant with someone who makes vermouth.

GRABER: It smells lovely. I would love this in like a… It would be like, nice in a sachet. So now I’m going to just eat this. Try these? …Agh! Whoa, it’s bitter. Ehm, blegh. Smells better than it tastes. Bleh.

ANDY QUADY: Oh, yeah. Bleh! [SPITS] The bitterness stays, though.

TWILLEY: Smells great, though. …Oh!

GRABER: I would just like to point out that Nicky’s face looks like just what I, the sounds that I made.

TWILLEY: That is like, the most bitter thing I’ve…

QUADY: This is a whole different kind of a disgusting taste.

TWILLEY: Catch the rest of our intrepid reporting in our episode on all things bitter, bitters, and vermouth. I guess there was a little bit of a clue in the fact that the name absinthe comes from the ancient Greek apsinthion, which means “undrinkable.”

GRABER: But the drink absinthe itself has always been considered quite drinkable, in part because of the more dominant flavors of aniseed and fennel, but also because distillers could add just kind of whatever other herbs they wanted to create all kinds of different flavor notes. And these herbs also gave a greenish tint to the drink.

TWILLEY: Some people drank the resulting greenish liquor neat, but Evan and Nina say most people enjoyed it prepared with water and sugar.

RAIL: The spirit was served in the glass, and generally there was a spoon that was placed on top of the glass. On top of the spoon, a sugar cube was placed, and then water was streamed over the sugar cube, diluting it into the glass of absinthe, creating the louche. Creating the cloudy appearance that people like.

GRABER: This cloudiness is something that happens when water hits alcohol that has a lot of botanical oils in it. This is particularly common in anise-flavored drinks like pastis and ouzo, in fact it’s often called the ouzo effect. But water is even more important to add to absinthe.

RAIL: You wouldn’t really want to sip something that has 72 percent alcohol. It’s just too abrasive. Adding a little bit of water also opens up the aromas.

TWILLEY: Evan and Nina told us this whole process of adding the water slowly is very soothing, and the resulting drink is quite refreshing.

STUDER: It’s a very relaxing moment. And it takes time to prepare a glass of absinthe. Still today, you should take your time to drink your glass of absinthe.

RAIL: It’s a sipping drink. It is a drink that really complements a summer evening.

GRABER: All of this sounds delightful. I’m a huge fan of anise flavor in all foods, and slowing down and taking a sip of lightly sweetened and diluted, refreshing green herbal absinthe sounds like a lovely way to while away an afternoon. What it doesn’t sound is particularly scandalous.

TWILLEY: To figure out how a refreshing herbal beverage became the most banned drink in the world, we have to go back to the beginning, to the origins of absinthe in a little valley in Switzerland.

GRABER: And to the story of a Frenchman who moved there.

STUDER: Yeah. So, there are so many legends around this drink. But the one that is the most lasting one that has been, you know, from the very beginning perpetuated by the French side of it is that it was a French doctor, a male French doctor that invented the drink.

RAIL: People have said that absinthe was invented by Dr. Pierre Ordinaire, and they came up with a backstory for him. That he had escaped the French Revolution, that he was a doctor, that he invented this spirit single handedly.

GRABER: Like many great origin stories that lay the credit at the feet of just one man with a really fun name, this story is not true.

RAIL: First of all, that Dr. Pierre Ordinaire wasn’t really a doctor. He was a deserter from the French army. Who did not flee the French Revolution, because he got to Switzerland before the French Revolution took place. And he applied for the job of a village doctor. And got the job, even though he wasn’t actually a doctor. He was just someone who had a little bit of knowledge. But it also kind of seems like he was embellishing his credentials and might’ve been something of a charlatan.

TWILLEY: Pierre Ordinaire may not have been an actual doctor, but he was an actual historical person. He does appear to have sold absinthe. Nina says he was probably credited with the invention after the fact, to make absinthe seem more French.

STUDER: The important thing is that he was a French man, and that he might have taken the recipe from France to Switzerland with him. That’s often hinted at in the texts as well. So, the French sources often portrayed as not at all a Swiss drink, but, despite its geographic place of origin, a very French drink.

TWILLEY: I mean, how could a drink be *that* great and, as we’ll see, that beloved by the French, and not actually be invented by a Frenchman? That’s the kind of unfortunate historical accident that calls for making up an entirely new origin legend.

GRABER: But, to leave the world of origin legends and get a little closer to actual history, if it wasn’t Pierre, who could it have been? Unsurprisingly, it was the Swiss. Nina told us it looks like the absinthe that Pierre was selling was really first created by local women in the area, using the local herbs to make a delicious drink—just like people have been doing in their home regions kind of everywhere that people made distilled drinks.

STUDER: So its origins are in the Val-de-Travers in Switzerland. Bordering France. And so this in Switzerland, the tradition is that it’s been invented by local Swiss women, distillers from this region. That are often weirdly described as witches and so on in the texts.

TWILLEY: This witchy business is something that came up in our vermouth episode: basically by the time we get to late Medieval, early Renaissance Europe, people had figured out how to distill alcohol and capture herbal essences that way. And women were often the ones responsible for doing this. The resulting tonics were seen as super powerful, and power in the hands of women is inherently witchy, at least according to the patriarchy.

GRABER: The region that absinthe was created in, the Val-de-Travers in Switzerland, it’s in the mountains and there happens to be a lot of wormwood that naturally grows around there.

RAIL: The plant, wormwood, just prefers that high altitude, the soil and all of the characteristics of the Val-de-Travers. And it’s around, it kind of perfumes the air.

STUDER: So wormwood has been cultivated there for a really long time, of course. But the first time that we find notes of the distilled drink in this region is about the 1760s. So we can’t really find sources for before that point in time.

TWILLEY: There it is, as close as we can actually get: the birth of absinthe! But here’s the thing, it’s in a remote Swiss valley. So how did it become a star in Paris?

GRABER: At the time, most people in France were drinking wine. The French have long loved wine. They also drank cider, and beer. They did not drink much of these harder alcohols.

TWILLEY: But in the late 1700s, northern Italians had started drinking herbal liquors, specifically vermouth. They would drink it before dinner, as an aperitivo.

GRABER: And this spread to France, where the pre-dinner drink became an aperitif. And the French did like vermouth, which also has wormwood in it, but they fell much harder for absinthe.

TWILLEY: One clue that the demand for absinthe in France really started to increase comes from the fact that the Swiss started to find the French revenue service a little bothersome.

RAIL: The Swiss distillers moved just across the border to Pontarlier, in France. Just on the other side of the border so that they didn’t have to have their spirit taxed as an import.

GRABER: Businesses avoiding paying taxes, apparently that’s not new. But this is still local demand, Pontarlier is not too far from absinthe’s home, it’s just across the border.

TWILLEY: What really made absinthe take off in France more broadly was, oddly, the French colonization of Algeria in the 1830s.

GRABER: The story goes that the French soldiers in Algeria were supplied with a daily ration of absinthe for its supposed health benefits. And they loved it.

TWILLEY: This sounds super plausible, I could totally imagine the French military insisting on the importance of an aperitif while brutally conquering Arabs. But Nina says nope, not so fast.

STUDER: In all the sources that I’ve looked through, I have never found a description of actual absinthe rations distributed to the army. I found plenty of coffee rations and wine rations, but no absinthe rations. So, yes—so this idea that that was a ration distributed to the French army seems to be a complete myth. But yes, a very popular [LAUGH] myth.

TWILLEY: That said, the soldiers were drinking absinthe. But Nina says it’s not clear how they were getting hold of it.

GRABER: Even though it wasn’t part of the official rations, they did seem to be drinking it for their health. Absinthe—like nearly all of those early alcoholic tonics—it had historically been thought to be a kind of medicine.

TWILLEY: And that seemed helpful to Europeans trying to survive in this unfamiliar environment, in north Africa.

STUDER: Because they were confronted with all these diseases, that they had no means of fighting at the time. With the climate that they were not used to, with fevers and everything. And no regular access to clean water. And you can very commonly find descriptions of it cleaning the water. So the soldiers being confronted with dirty drinking water, adding absinthe to it, and the louching, and the strong smell of the drink, making it seem to them as if they were drinking now a cleaner version of the water that they had access to.

TWILLEY: We know today that adding absinthe to water was more of a placebo than an effective purification technology. But drinking absinthe wasn’t just reassuring to the soldiers. According to Nina, the historical sources make it seem like drinking absinthe was really a mental health intervention.

STUDER: What can be found is this idea of the absinthe drinking being a moment of, a communal moment. Of these soldiers coming together, having a moment of peace in the camps, of sitting together somewhere under a tree in a tent, whatever. Sitting down and having absinthe together. So it being really a moment of sociability, a communal experience, a shared moment in what was definitely a hard life in North Africa.

GRABER: Whatever it did for them, the soldiers clearly liked it, and they brought it back to France.

STUDER: And so you find very bizarre descriptions in the source material of like these victorious regiments returning to France. And Absinthe following them, wherever they went. And absinthe came to be perceived as as a part of this colonial success in North Africa, military success in North Africa.

TWILLEY: Back in France, the bourgeoisie had really boomed as a social class in the early 1800s. These wealthy upper middle class urbanites loved winning and glory and all things successful.

STUDER: And so they really latched onto this idea of this drink being part and parcel of this. colonial success, maybe what made the soldiers successful in a little way as well.

GRABER: So they started drinking it. And then from the bourgeousie, absinthe took off with the crowd who were really going to make it famous: the artists.

STUDER: And that’s obviously what it’s most known for nowadays. It became the green muse. The green fairy that gave inspiration to artists. Be it in writing or in paintings or whatever.

TWILLEY: This second wave of absinthe appreciation got going in the cafes and bars of Paris in the 1860s.

STUDER: So there was a wave of absinthe popping up in poems, absinthe being a part of, storylines and different—by different authors, and especially it being painted.

GRABER: Absinthe might have been the muse, but what was really exciting at the time wasn’t the drink, but Paris itself.

RAIL: Well Paris in the 19th century was the capital of the modern world in a lot of ways. It was the capital of the French speaking world, but it was one of the world’s capitals of culture. And there was a lot going on.

TWILLEY: And there were also a lot of places to get a drink: cafes, bars, cabarets. French licensing laws had been relaxed in the 1860s, and by the end of the 1800s, France had more places to legally get a drink than anywhere else in the world.

GRABER: All those artists and writers living in Paris particularly sought out absinthe over all other drinks not because it might provide them with colonial success and bourgeois winning, but because they thought it had some special, almost magical powers.

STUDER: They really thought that it was stimulating. It was stimulating for their brains. It was stimulating for their artistic fibers. And, they thought it was different from all other kinds of drinks. That there was something in it that caused hallucinations. Positive hallucinations. Visions, dreams, that they then could then capture in their paintings and incorporate into their poems, et cetera.

TWILLEY: Big name poets like Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine famously drank quite a bit of absinthe. Painters like Van Gogh, Toulouse Lautrec and Gauguin also got a reputation for chugging the green fairy.

GRABER: Artists often included absinthe in their paintings, too. Degas has a famous painting called The Absinthe Drinker. Toulouse-Lautrec used similar green tones throughout a cafe painting. It was so ubiquitous, absinthe just permeated the culture of the time.

STUDER: So it really became a moment of, after work, in the afternoon, people went to the cafes, sat down, started to people-watch, started to prepare their absinthe and started to socialize.

TWILLEY: Forget wine or beer or even vermouth. The pre-dinner drink of choice in Paris was absinthe.

RAIL: The aperitif was so commonly thought of as absinthe that it was called “the green hour,” because everybody at that hour was drinking this wonderfully dark green spirit diluted with water.

GRABER: And they needed an hour. There was a whole ritual with absinthe, there were these fountains that would slowly drip water over a sugar cube into your glass and you could watch it and wait for it to be ready. We have a great image of this, and you can find it on our website, gastropod.com.

TWILLEY: And because this time period also coincided with advances in printing technology, there were huge full color posters advertising absinthe all over town—we’re sharing those online and in our social too. Paris was basically saturated with absinthe.

STUDER: So it came to be really seen as a symbol of France. Of, of this very particular moment of the Belle Epoque in France.

GRABER: The Belle Epoque was literally “the beautiful time,” this era that started in the 1870s in France with all the artists and culture. It was also this moment of relative peace and beauty before World War I. But when tourists at the time came to visit Paris, you know what they wanted? A glass of absinthe, during the green hour.

STUDER: They wanted to be part of that. They wanted to witness it and they wanted to try it themselves. And so you can find all kinds of descriptions of this moment. Of what it felt like to witness this moment when, suddenly the streets were flooded by these people of all different classes coming together and happily consuming their absinthe. So there is a very romanticized vision of what this hour of absinthe meant for France.

GRABER: This still sounds lovely. And nothing in this story would lead me to believe that anyone would even consider banning this beloved drink.

TWILLEY: But they did. The story of how absinthe became seen as doing the devil’s work, after the break.

[BREAK]

TWILLEY: Like the story of how it got popular, the story of how absinthe became so dangerous it had to be banned also begins in North Africa. In the 1840s and 1850s, the decades following the initial French invasion—kind of in parallel with the narrative around absinthe being associated with winning, and health, and success—a counternarrative emerged.

STUDER: There it is, these people who were sent to Algeria to conquer the country. To conquer these Muslim masses. And instead of doing that, they drank. And they drank too much.

GRABER: Sure, at first the soldiers had been seen as great conquerors. But as both soldiers and settlers were stuck there for a while and continued to enjoy their absinthe, they were gradually all seen as people who were just drinking too much.

STUDER: And that was dangerous. Settlers drinking is dangerous for a colonial nation, because they need strong settlers, able to do manual labor, able to produce healthy children. Otherwise, the colony is not safe.

TWILLEY: What’s more, it wasn’t just soldiers and settlers who were drinking, it was also—shock, horror—the locals.

STUDER: And so when the Muslims started to drink alcohol, that was absinthe. That was a complicated moment for French observers. Because on the one hand, they viewed it as a necessary step in civilization. Drinking alcohol, wine, was seen as a necessary step in becoming more civilized. But absinthe was the wrong one. That’s, within the French logic.

GRABER: Muslims are religiously prohibited from drinking alcohol. But plenty did at the time and still do. Basically, the French colonizers thought that when local Muslims drank *wine* they became more French. But if it was absinthe? They had no self-control.

STUDER: They drink until they’re completely drunk, and then they became more dangerous than they already are.

GRABER: This was the colonial logic of the era—we’re not justifying it, we’re just explaining what the French were telling themselves.

TWILLEY: Meanwhile, back on the mainland, there was another emerging threat: women. French women were gradually enjoying a teeny weeny bit of liberation, and as part of that some of them were riding newly-invented bicycles down to the cafe, and ordering themselves an absinthe.

GRABER: And they were also organizing to get more rights for women. What a nightmare.

STUDER: So this, this fighting for rights was connected with the image of the new woman in France and the new woman turned out to be an absinthe drinker. She, she also turned out to wear, wear trousers, for example, and smoke, but she was an absinthe drinker.

TWILLEY: Obviously this was something of a threat to the status quo. And worse, at first it was just bourgeois women, but then the working classes started drinking absinthe too, including women.

STUDER: And this was seen as a dangerous moment for French society. Because especially once it was the working class women, they were described as neglecting their duties as mothers, neglecting their duties as wives, as letting their their children drink absinthe. As being unfit mothers and all these kinds of things.

GRABER: These working class women and their husbands had finally been able to enjoy absinthe, just like the richer folks were doing, because absinthe had gotten a little less expensive. In part this is because in the 1870s there was a grape disease called phylloxera.

RAIL: Phylloxera was a disease that spread from the United States, or from North America, and infected most European vineyards. It actually greatly dented the production of wine starting around 1860 or so.

TWILLEY: Absinthe makers responded to this by switching their base from distilled grape alcohol to distilled grain alcohol, which had the bonus of being much cheaper. AKA, affordable for the lowly workers.

GRABER: But of course, once those lowly workers got their hands on absinthe, it lost some of its luster.

STUDER: The workers were believed to lack a certain moderation that the upper classes were believed to have. Obviously this is completely nonsensical, but that’s what the argument was at the time. That where, whereas the bourgeoisie, they just drank one glass and were happy with it, but the working classes couldn’t. They drank too much. They drank excessively.

TWILLEY: Again, their logic, not ours. But in general, at the same that France was enjoying the artistic golden age we now know as the Belle Epoque, it was also recovering from a bit of a rough patch, politically and militarily. The French lost a major war against Germany in 1870, Paris was besieged for months and then went kind of rogue and had a revolution that was brutally crushed, and lots of people ended up dead.

GRABER: So on the one hand in the 1870s you had the Belle Epoque and all the glamorous writers—and on the other hand you also had a nation that just experienced a crushing defeat, and so they were trying to pick themselves up again and navigate this new reality.

TWILLEY: And maybe unsurprisingly, a lot of Parisians at the time were drinking a lot of alcohol. They were drinking more of everything than they ever had in the past. And also unsurprisingly this was making people act like—well, like alcoholics.

GRABER: But in this tricky time, people didn’t want to blame their beloved wine or beer. They clearly needed those. They did need to blame something, though.

TWILLEY: And so absinthe was it. Doctors at the time increasingly started to say that drinking absinthe caused a condition called absinthism.

STUDER: So, this is the idea that people grew addicted to absinthe, and that this chronic or acute consumption of absinthe had very serious consequences. And so it was a diagnosis separate from, but parallel to alcoholism. And it was perceived, especially in France, as being much worse than alcoholism. Much, much worse.

TWILLEY: One doctor wrote that any given individual was 246 times more likely to become insane from drinking absinthe than from drinking any other form of alcohol, which seems oddly precise.

GRABER: But it’s also really odd that among all the drinks, sure it was popular, but people were drinking a lot of different things, why was absinthe singled out?

STUDER: People, medical voices in the 19th century, they thought that these essential oils of different plants were really dangerous. And that they could cause, like, attacks, like epileptic attacks in people. And absinthe was believed to have the most dangerous of these essential oils in it.

GRABER: Another doctor at the time said that “the absinthic, like the epileptic, is morally unbalanced.” Yet a third said that “absinthism predisposes in a quite special way to violent reactions and therefore to crimes of the blood.”

STUDER: They believe that absinthism could cause trembling, paralysis. All kinds of physical symptoms. But then the really serious ones were insanity, hallucinations. Like moments of blanking, of forgetting what you had just been doing, of not recognizing people. And then this murderous rage.

RAIL: And there was a doctor who, basically made it a small career out of just demonizing absinthe. He studied what happened when you give animals the extract of wormwood, in very high doses.

TWILLEY: This is a genuinely horrible story, but in short this French psychiatrist force fed dogs toxic levels of wormwood, and then injected it into their stomachs, and then for good measure he hung them up by their front paws so they couldn’t vomit it out. The results were not pretty.

RAIL: And what happened what happens when you give wormwood in very high doses to living creatures as they have seizures, and they collapse, and they can’t function. But nobody who drinks absinthe now or then was consuming that amount of the extract of wormwood.

TWILLEY: The key chemical here is thujone: that’s the active ingredient in wormwood essential oil. And at very high levels, thujone is a neurotoxin, and it does cause convulsions and hallucinations.

STUDER: But the quantity of it in a glass of absinthe is much too small to cause anything like that.

RAIL: The problem with absinthe was largely that people were just consuming too much alcohol.

STUDER: So it was kind of a communal panic around this drink where people confused the effects of alcohol for the assumed effects of these essential oils.

TWILLEY: This study with the dogs and the wormwood was flawed ethically and scientifically, to say the very least. But at the time, it was compelling evidence—the medical community was pretty convinced that absinthe caused all these dreadful symptoms, fits and murderous rages et cetera.

GRABER: But the even bigger concern about absinthe was its impact on the next generation and the greater glory of France.

STUDER: It was also believed that absinthe drinking could be inherited, maybe, so that the next generation would also drink absinthe. And so that this would necessarily at some point lead to the degeneration of France.

GRABER: As we’ve said, that decline was already seen militarily in France, they were losing wars, and so the narrative around absinthe started to change. Instead of being associated with winning, it was linked to losing. It began to be seen as a danger for soldiers everywhere. Doctors and generals described absinthe as the most dangerous thing of all in North Africa.

STUDER: So it was not the North Africans, who rebelled against them throughout the 19th century. It was not the many diseases, ranging from typhus to malaria, et cetera. It was absinthe. Absinthe came to be defined as the biggest killer of Frenchmen in Algeria.

TWILLEY: Forget bullets and disease, absinthe was the real problem. And in fact, the military were the first to try to tackle this problem, by banning absinthe.

STUDER: From the 1840s onwards I have found bans of absinthe in the French army in Algeria. So regular prohibitions that people were not allowed to drink absinthe in the camps, were not allowed to sell absinthe in the camps, et cetera.

GRABER: Nina says bans plural, because none of them ever worked. Still this is where the first notion of an absinthe ban got started, in Algeria. But it was in Europe where the bans finally took hold thanks to the murderous rage of one man in Switzerland. That’s coming up, after the break.

[BREAK]

RAIL: Jean Lanfray is—a, a legendary figure in the absinthe world. Because his story was repeated across Europe. It was in every newspaper. It made a lot of headlines.

TWILLEY: Jean Lanfray was a 31-year-old Swiss day laborer. And he was not famous so much as notorious.

RAIL: He brutally murdered his wife and children, in a fit, while drunk. And it was reported that he was drunk on absinthe.

GRABER: Drunk—yes. Apparently that day in August 1905, he’d consumed seven glasses of wine, six glasses of cognac, one coffee with some brandy poured in, two glasses of creme de menthe, and a couple of glasses of absinthe to top it all off.

RAIL: Absinthe wasn’t really even the largest share of the alcohol he consumed that day, which is, it’s a ridiculous number if you look at it. It’s, it’s a large amount of mostly wine.

TWILLEY: Large being quite an understatement here. Jean Lanfray drank nearly two bottles of wine, plus all the other liquor, and he’d reportedly only eaten a single sandwich.

GRABER: According to the reports, he regularly downed that much alcohol over the course of a day, this unfortunately was not unusual.

TWILLEY: But on this particular day he went home and his pregnant wife had, apparently, ignored his request—which was, no doubt, charmingly phrased—to polish his boots. And that disrespect, plus all the alcohol was enough for Jean to snap and kill his wife and children.

STUDER: And very quickly after those murders, it was stated in the Swiss national papers that it was an “absinthe murder.” That it had been committed under the influence of absinthe.

RAIL: And… the idea that the spirit caused this horrific crime was very easy to repeat and, and sell to a willing public.

GRABER: It might seem strange that the public would blame absinthe when there was so much else in his system. But people thought that the ill effects of those oils in absinthe, the things that caused murderous rages, they lingered, and they accumulated over time. They were the problem, not the alcohol.

TWILLEY: And so, this panic around absinthe, and all the horror at the Jean Lanfray murder case, it all came together to prompt a series of absinthe bans.

STUDER: The people in Switzerland turned against absinthe and they collected signatures against it. And there was a vote. And by 1908, it was prohibited because of that.

TWILLEY: Over the next few years, the movement to ban absinthe spread across Europe and even to the US. The era of the green hour was over.

GRABER: Not totally. It wasn’t banned absolutely everywhere, which was fortunate for some of the French distillers.

RAIL: They moved to Spain, where production was legal. Other distillers, they switched to making pastis, a famous drink of South of France.

TWILLEY: In Switzerland, the home of absinthe, despite the murders and the ban, production never stopped. Local women kept on doing what they’d always done.

RAIL: It was illegal, and the authorities tried to crack down on it for almost a hundred years, but it never went away. They never got rid of it. The taste for absinthe was just simply too strong in the Val-de-Travers.

GRABER: They really loved it there, so they came up with some creative ways to hide what they were doing. First of all, distillers came up with a new absinthe that they called blue, but it was actually clear. They just skipped the traditional final steep in the herbs that turned it green.

RAIL: If you saw a clear bottle of a dark green liquor, you would know that that’s absinthe. So they stopped coloring the absinthe and instead left it perfectly clear. But in addition to not coloring it, they started packaging it in in strange packages. They would package it in, in cans of carrots or peas, some vegetables with a label that says carrots or peas. But it would be an actual metal can, just like of any canned food. And that would, inside, would be no carrots or peas, but simply absinthe.

TWILLEY: Of course, the whole process of making absinthe had to be hidden, not just the final product.

RAIL: If you’re drying wormwood, that has a very strong smell. But if you’re drying wormwood in your barn, with hay, and you have a cow or a couple of horses, it might not smell as strong outside the barn as, as it would if it were just a place drying wormwood by itself.

GRABER: And then you needed a way to communicate what you were doing without saying it. So in the bar, a thirsty customer might ask for a cup of milk, which wasn’t actually milk—but rather a milky looking substance, remember it gets cloudy when you add water to it. And it might even have been served in a white milk cup.

TWILLEY: And if a known distiller said they were doing the laundry, well, they probably weren’t cleaning any clothes.

RAIL: What that meant to anyone who was in the know was that she was making a fresh batch of absinthe—clandestine absinthe, bootleg absinthe, for consumption for the local populace.

TWILLEY: For nearly a century, that was the deal. People in this small region of Switzerland still enjoyed absinthe on the regular. And like we said, some small distillers in European countries where absinthe had never been banned, like Spain, still made it for local consumption. But otherwise really it fell off the map.

GRABER: Until this one guy in the UK decided to try to bring it back. He imported booze, and he traveled to Prague in the mid-90s, which was *the* cool place to visit at the time. He enjoyed some Czech beer and Czech absinthe, because it wasn’t illegal there either. And he decided to import it.

TWILLEY: Absinthe had also never been banned in the UK, but it had never really been produced there either. So until this Czech absinthe hit the market, you couldn’t really find it. But it caught on fast in the 90s. In part, that’s because everything Czech was cool back then. But it was also because of absinthe’s reputation.

RAIL: I think absinthe reminds us that we are, we are doing something a little bit dangerous. And there’s something a little bit romantic about drinking something that might be dangerous.

GRABER: Might be dangerous—we now know that it’s not, but even in the 90s, it was still seen that way, because at the time it was still banned in much of the world. The bans didn’t end until about a decade later. As we’ve said, it’s no more dangerous than sipping a glass of ouzo. But that misperception is part of what’s so exciting. And it still persists to this day

TWILLEY: So many TV shows and movies have this trope, the idea that drinking absinthe is going to eff you up.

GUY: What’s that?

GUY 2: It’s absinthe. Frommer says it’s illegal in the states because it makes you hallucinate and go crazy. They call it the green fairy.

[POURING]

NICK: Aaabsiiiiinthe!

STUDER: People are trying to look for this. They are always so disappointed when I tell them that absinthe does not actually make people go insane or something like that. They want to see it, still today, as this special drink. And they are intensely disappointed when I try to tell them that it’s just another form of really highly alcoholic alcohol.

TWILLEY: For a while, people thought that pre-ban absinthe must have had much higher levels of wormwood, and thus higher levels of thujone, and so that was why it was so exciting and dangerous. But no.

RAIL: Historic research has proven that, the levels are pretty comparable to what we have today. They’re not out ofline. They’re often lower than modern absinthe,

GRABER: But the thing is, even though those pre-ban absinthes didn’t have more thujone, they do still have their own mystique. And you can still find them.

RAIL: The world is divided into before the ban and after the ban. And Absinthe from before the ban is known, it’s called pre-ban, and people just talk about drinking pre-bans. And then there is everything else. The interesting thing about the pre-bans is that, they are going to go away. At some point, there will be none left. But at this point in time, a new bottle of pre-ban absinthe surfaces at least every month. It hits the auction sites and it’s real.

TWILLEY: Evan told us that finding these pre-ban absinthes takes some serious detective work: people looking through old papers, trying to find order receipts and invoices and where the absinthe was shipped—and then going there to ask the owners, hey, do you by any chance have some bottles tucked away in a corner of your wine cellar?

GRABER: And sometimes these absinthe detectives are lucky and they find a stash of century-old bottles. These can then be sold for two or three thousand dollars each. And many of the collectors don’t buy them just to gaze upon them and imagine the world in which they were created, they actually drink them.

RAIL: They’re not fooling around. They open them regularly. They drink them, they share them with friends. And that is for them, worth it. To buy a bottle from, oh, say 1890. And taste a spirit inside the bottle that has been captive for 130 something years. That is the same spirit, the very same batch that was consumed by someone like Oscar Wilde. It is a way to touch the past, to taste the past that is unlike anything else.

TWILLEY: Evan told us he’s been lucky enough to try a few pre-ban absinthes in the course of his research.

RAIL: I think about 10 at this point. And they are often wonderful. They can be a little flat. I think sometimes they might, they might not age perfectly. But generally speaking, because they’re so high in alcohol, they’re perfectly preserved over a century. And when you open the bottle, the room fills with the aromas of anise and other herbs. Immediately. They are very heavily perfumed. They’re wonderfully aromatic. They’re really delicious.

GRABER: But not all of those pre-ban absinthe bottles that people spend thousands of dollars on are the real deal—in his book, Evan traces the story of probably the most prolific absinthe counterfeiter. He was able to fool even serious collectors for quite a while.

TWILLEY: We have more of the ins and outs of that story in our special supporters’ newsletter, which you can get by supporting the show. But all of this business of pre-ban, rare absinthe—it just plays into the mystique of the drink. Absinthe was seen as different from other drinks back in the 1800s, and it still is today.

GRABER: Nina and Evan don’t see that changing anytime soon.

STUDER: So you can do, you know, secret absinthe tours and, and you know, visit former secret distilleries and all these things. So, I think as long as the producers of various absinthe brands continue to play into this mystique of it, into the scandalous history. And as long as the consumers are looking for a particularly scandalous drink, perhaps, its popularity will continue.

RAIL: It’s held on to this idea of being a spirit for romantics. And for artists. And for writers—for more than a century, you know. We’re at two centuries of thinking about this as a spirit for decadent lifestyles. I don’t see that going away.

GRABER: That’s even though you can find absinthe behind almost any bar these days, it’s made by lots of distillers, and it’s a really important flavor note in a lot of classic cocktails. I love a good absinthe cocktail.

STUDER: I like the absinthe cocktails and the mixes as well, but I think there is something to this moment of sitting down with those fountains. And, getting the whole experience of, you know, sitting there for 15 minutes and slowly watching drip into your glass and everything. And so that’s something that nowadays you can experience best in absinthe bars, that are popping up all over the place. So I think if you want to experience absinthe, drinking it that way—so with a bit of sugar, diluted with water, in a relaxed atmosphere. That’s the, that’s the, the thing you should try for.

[MUSIC]

TWILLEY: Cheers to that. And thanks this episode to Nina Studer and Evan Rail, we have links to their new books at Gastropod.com.

GRABER: Thanks also to our superstar producer Claudia Geib. And just a reminder, we’re putting together our reports for the foundations that help support the show, and we’d love to include your stories about how Gastropod makes a difference to you. Do you quote it at dinner? Have you changed how you eat in any way? Do you cite it at work, or use it in the classroom? Send us an email at [email protected], and thanks!

TWILLEY: And finally, we have a special birthday shout out to Kim Behzadi. She is a Gastropod supporter but also runs a very cool culinary bookstore in Buffalo called Read It & Eat—where just FYI, you can also find signed copies of my book, Frostbite! Happy belated birthday, Kim!

GRABER: We’ll be back with a brand new episode soon! ‘Til then.