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Just across the impasse from the Delirium Cafe, next to the statue of Jeanneke Pis, the Delirium Cafe has opened an absinthe bar.
They're trying to do for absinthe what they did for beer in terms of stocking and consumption.
At right and below you see a tall shot glass of absinthe with a layer of sugar in the bottom. Sugar? See the following explanation.
What I knew of absinthe was limited to its tradition. La fée verte. The ritualized preparation with the slotted spoon, drizzled water, and sugar cube. The louche or milky clouding of the resulting liquid.
Things are different now, at least in bars catering to foreign visitors looking to get hammered.
First you choose from a bewildering variety. See the thick menu in the picture at left, with the pink binder.
The absinthe is poured into a tall shot glass. A slotted spoon is used to dunk a sugar cube into the absinthe and then suspend it above the glass.
The sugar cube is then lit on fire. It's burning here, but the pale blue alcohol flame is almost invisible with the camera flash.
The plan is to ignite the absinthe-soaked cube, let it burn briefly, then drop the cube into the glass.
Absinthe-soaked sugar cubes are flammable, but dropping the burning cube into the glass of absinthe extinguishes the flame.
Here is a shot in which the flame is more visible, although the lack of flash makes for a rather blurry picture. My assistant, one of a group of vacationing French midwives (and there's an infrequently used phrase) is urging me to quickly extinguish the flame by dropping the sugar cube into the glass, "before all the alcohol burns off."
Since it's just the sugar cube that's burning, the only ethanol you're going to lose is what is permeating the sugar cube. But here I am trying to be scientific in an absinthe bar. That's probably not a very useful plan.
As you can see here and in the pictures at the top of the page, the sugar doesn't really dissolve in the absinthe. We could drift into a futilely scientific digression on the relative solubilities of sucrose in water versus ethanol, but once again, an absinthe bar probably isn't the best venue for science. The sugar provides a gritty sweetness to offset the overpowering sensations of anise and alcohol. Let's leave it at that.
This fire-based preparation is called "The Bohemian Method" as it comes from the Czech Republic, where absinthe production continued during bans in western Europe and the U.S.
I learned of the Czech terminology after visiting the absinthe bar. The Czech origin makes sense to me. Having been to Russia and Estonia a number of times, I thought that the absinthe bar had a very Far Eastern European atmosphere.
Part of this was due to the groups of young guys in black leather jackets and Russian Prison Haircuts shouting in various Slavic languages between downing shots of absinthe. Well, some of them were shouting. One was unconscious, bent forward with his forehead on the table. Another seemed to be unconscious as he was lying motionless on the floor under their table.
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| © Bob Cromwell May 2012. Created with /bin/vi and ImageMagick, hosted on OpenBSD with Apache. Root password available here, privacy policy here. |
