the goodist

Review: Lucid Absinthe

I can think of no better way to kick off The Goodist than a review of the first traditional absinthe allowed into US borders since it's prohibition over 90 years ago - Lucid by Ted Breaux. A wildly popular beverage in western Europe in the late 1800's and legendary for it's "more than just booze" effects on the mind, it's a topic swirling with controversy and confusion due to it's long absence. Fear not, for today your burning questions will be answered at long last with the help of The Goodist and some very willing friends.

A Primer on Absinthe

"Absinthe makes you crazy and criminal, provokes epilepsy and tuberculosis, and has killed thousands of French people. It makes a ferocious beast of man, a martyr of woman, and a degenerate of the infant, it disorganizes and ruins the family and menaces the future of the country."

It was propaganda like this that lead to a cascade of absinthe bans across Europe, culminating in 1915 in France (where it had skyrocketed to such popularity that it exceeded sales of wine) and Switzerland - the country of it's birth. The Swiss even included the ban in it's constitution. Absinthe was a victim of it's own success, as the most popular spirit of it's day, it was the target of teetotalers, wine lobbyists, and doctors who mercifully reported syphilis deaths as "Absinthe Disease".

Absinthe's absence generated a canon of fearful mythology over the next 80 years, with most of the western world simultaneously frightened and intrigued by the lore of it's wormwood-infused psychedelic effects on some of the greatest artists of the 19th century. Curiosity led to experimentation as adventurous souls wandered into herb shops to try to make the stuff themselves by soaking herbs in alcohol (bad idea!). After the ban was somewhat accidentally lifted in the EU in 1988, distilleries popped up making mostly poor quality versions due to lack of experience and the loss of authentic recipes.

It finally took chemist Ted Breaux to track down a pre-prohibition bottle and put it through a gas spectrometer in 2000 to reveal the truth about the green faire. Thujone, the neurotoxin in wormwood, was in fact a very minor player in the overall composition of absinthe - typically less than 10 parts per million. You would be dead from alcohol poisoning far before you'd be high from thujone. So what caused the notorious absinthe high?

Introducing The Goodist

This is a blog about consumption.

Consumption, trivialized and degraded in our culture's recent history, deserves a little more respect. After all, didn't life define itself the first time one thing intentionally consumed another? It's our first satisfaction, and although our taste for the things we consume is the product of craving what's best for us to live, it's also far more than functional or just the satisfaction of a need. Beer, wine and tea (things we now relegate to luxuries) all owe their invention to the necessity of purifying water, yet they've become much much more than that. Over thousands of years we've pushed the experience of consumption to the limits of our senses and now live in a very privileged age. The march of technology has shrunk our world to make Chuao cocoa beans and Szechuan peppercorns as accessible as a local tomato, and not just available, but reasonably affordable - we can all experience the great pleasures of being alive no matter our income.

Well that's enough philosophizing, after all, eating and drinking at it's best is a simple satisfying pleasure and not a religion. This blog is devoted to those pleasures whether they be cooking, wine, booze, tea, beer, or dining. Articles and reviews might have a bit of a Portland bias, but that's purely a consequence of where I happen to live.

I dedicate this blog to my family - a small tribe of dedicated hedonists without which I may have never developed a taste for the simple pleasures of life - to my mother and uncle who fed me tofu and sushi with modest means - and with special affection to my grandfather, our late patriarch, who lived outside of his means to always provide the finest t-bones, figs, and Dom Perignon. I raise a spirited glass of endless gratitude to the three of you.

Tim Don (an alias and alter ego based on my middle name and homage to my grandfather)