Chuck,

Thought of you when I read this since you are a man of science. And am posting for the rest of Obner since you are all into spirits. Here is a guy that knows what to do with his advanced degree!

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.11/absinthe.html

The Mystery of the Green Menace
It's been celebrated as a muse and banned as a poison. Now an obsessed microbiologist has cracked the code for absinthe - and distilled his own.
By Brian Ashcraft

At first, Ted Breaux dismissed the urgent warnings on TV and radio. He even ignored the sirens that started blaring Saturday afternoon. "The last two times they evacuated the city, I stayed," says Breaux, 39, a chemist and environmental microbiologist. But when he woke up on Sunday, August 28, the hurricane had become a Category 5 and was still bearing down on New Orleans. He decided it was time to get out of his house on the floodplain just south of Lake Pontchartrain. He packed his Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution with all the essentials: clothes, toiletries, a laptop, some World War II rifles, ammo, and $15,000 worth of absinthe.

It took Breaux six hours to go 20 miles, and a full day to reach refuge in Huntsville, Alabama. He spent the next week watching Fox News, looking at aerial photos of New Orleans on his laptop, wondering if his friends had made it out, and cursing himself for not remembering to grab his original 1908 copy of Aux Pays d'Absinthe.

Raised in New Orleans, a city once dubbed the Absinthe Capital of the World, Breaux has long been fascinated with the drink. Absinthe is a 140-proof green liqueur made from herbs like fennel, anise, and the exceptionally bitter leaves of Artemisia absinthium. That last ingredient, also known as wormwood, gives the drink its name - and its sinister reputation. For a century, absinthe has been demonized and outlawed, based on the belief that it leads to absinthism - far worse than mere alcoholism. Drinking it supposedly causes epilepsy and "criminal dementia."

Breaux has made understanding the drink his life's work. He has pored over hundred-year-old texts, few of them in English. He has corresponded with other amateur liquor historians. The more he's learned, the more he's felt compelled to use his knowledge of chemistry to crack the absinthe code, figure out exactly what's in it, puncture the myths surrounding it - and maybe even drink a glass or two.

Dressed in a black muscle T-shirt, blue jeans, and a Dolce & Gabbana belt, Breaux looks as if he'd be more at home on Bourbon Street than in a research lab. It's a humid summer morning in July, about a month before Hurricane Katrina will strike, and he's showing me around Environmental Analytical Solutions Inc., a chemical testing facility among the warehouses and body shops near Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport.

On the outside, EASI is classic New Orleans: red brick, white pillars. But inside it's more like a set from War Games: dot matrix printers, ancient PCs, and nine Hewlett-Packard gas chromatography-mass spectrometer machines attached to large blue tanks of helium and hydrogen. This is where Breaux does his lab work, testing water samples for pollution and pesticides. In his downtime, he studies absinthe here.

Using the GCMS apparatus, he's able to break the liqueur down into its component molecules. "It's like forensics," Breaux says, gesturing toward the machines. "Give me one microliter of absinthe and I know exactly what it's going to taste like."

Breaux explains how the testing works. He takes a bottle of the liqueur, inserts a syringe through the cork (absinthe oxidizes like wine once the bottle is open), and extracts a few milliliters. He transfers the sample into a vial, which is lifted by a robotic arm into the gas chromatography tower. There it is separated into its components. Then the mass spectrometer identifies them and measures their relative quantities.

One of the ingredients is thujone, a compound in wormwood that is toxic if it's ingested, capable of causing violent seizures and kidney failure. Breaux hands me a bottle of pure liquid thujone. "Take a whiff," he says with an evil grin. I recoil at the odor - it's like menthol laced with napalm. This is the noxious chemical compound responsible for absinthe's bad reputation. The question that's been debated for years is, Just how much thujone is there in absinthe?

Absinthe was first distilled in 1792 in Switzerland, where it was marketed as a medicinal elixir, a cure for stomach ailments. High concentrations of chlorophyll gave it a rich olive color. In the 19th century, people began turning to the minty drink less for pains of the stomach than for pains of the soul. Absinthe came to be associated with artists and Moulin Rouge bohemians. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Van Gogh, and Picasso were devotees. Toulouse-Lautrec carried some in a hollowed-out cane. Oscar Wilde wrote, "What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset?" Soon absinthe was the social lubricant of choice for a broad swath of Europeans - artists and otherwise. In 1874, the French sipped 700,000 liters of the stuff; by the turn of the century, consumption had shot up to 36 million liters, driven in part by a phylloxera infestation that had devastated the wine-grape harvest.

By the early 20th century, absinthe was becoming popular in America. It found a natural reception in New Orleans, where the bon temps were already rolling. Breaux's own great-grandparents were known to enjoy an occasional glass. But the drink was drawing fire for its thujone content. "It is truly madness in a bottle, and no habitual drinker can claim that he will not become a criminal," declared one politician. The anti-absinthe fervor climaxed in 1905, when Swiss farmer Jean Lanfray shot his pregnant wife and two daughters after downing two glasses. (Overlooked was what else Lanfray consumed that day: crème de menthe, cognac, seven glasses of wine, coffee with brandy, and another liter of wine.) By the end of World War I, the "green menace" was made illegal everywhere in western Europe except Spain. No reputable distillery still made it.

The son of a NASA engineer, Breaux was always interested in how things work. At 13, he snuck out at night and rode his bike to the University of Louisiana campus to hack into its mainframe. "I'd snoop in people's records and steal the source code for videogames," he says. When he was 14, he figured out how to hot-wire bulldozers left overnight at construction sites; he and his friends would stage races. Later, while majoring in microbiology in Lafayette, Breaux tended bar and developed an interest in the chemistry of liquor. "Why is this tequila better than that one? Because it's aged a certain length of time or made with a higher concentration of a certain plant," he says. "I could see the science in it.http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.11/absinthe.html?pg=2&topic=absinthe&topic_set=

Mmmm...absinthe.

yeah, i read this already. thanks. i don't get that involved (yet) with my home brewing or winemaking.

T-
Have you had it?
This article makes me curious now!

I've only had the old, illegal, terrible stuff, I think.

After one glass, one sees the world as it isn't. After two, as it should be. After three, as it is - and that is scariest of all.

Oscar Wilde

Never had absinthe.

I have, however, always wondered why Jagermeister does to me what it does. I can't describe it. It's just a completely different drunk. Not trying to hijack, but does anyone else experience this?

A friend of mine picked up a small bottle of it for us while in France earlier this year. We haven't opened it yet, and I'm pretty sure it's going to be of the "sucky" variety. Very interesting story.

Give us an update please!

I thought this was going to be about Chuck D from Public Enemy ranting about Absinthe for some weird reason...

So did I. I was very confused when I first opened the thread.

I brought a couple bottles of absinthe back from Prague with me earlier in the year. I haven't opened them yet though.

THE WHITE DEVIL BE SELLING ABSINTHE TO MY HOMIES IN THE GHETTO!

Why would you buy absinthe and not open? Open that bad boy up! Let's party!

Last time me and my friends partied on Absinthe I was hung over for about 3 days. I've been a little leary of going that hard again.

Of course, I could drink it in moderation, but that's not very likely once we get going.

What's moderation?

Its what Aural, FT, and Konstintin do.

Oh, cuz it's not in my dictionary. musta left it out for a reason.

Don't make me moderate you!

I've had Absinthe once; it burned horribly going down. I did it as a shot (are you supposed to sip? ooops...) with some friends at a party. Someone had brought the bottle back from a trip to Europe. This was probably the sucky variety too; it tasted like concentrated Scope mouthwash.
And to Stop Eatin', yeah I now avoid tequila because of what it does to me. Not only do I usually have a headache the next day, but for me it's a totally different type of drunkeness. I tend to misbehave when tequila's involved...

Forbidden fruit
by Vivienne Baillie Gerritsen
source

After almost a century’s ban, Switzerland has just legalized the production of absinthe – that emerald-green liquor which was said to have caused the madness of many throughout the 1900s, one of whom was the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh. The beverage is prepared by macerating a cornucopia of spices and herbs such as aniseed, fennel, hyssop, lemon balm, angelica, star anise, dittany, juniper, nutmeg, veronica and wormwood oil in alcohol. It is hardly surprising that, upon abuse and on a long-term basis, such a mixture of chemicals should have an undesirable effect on our system. Nevertheless, at the dawn of the 21st century, a better understanding of absinthe’s claimed toxicity is slowly surfacing and fingers are pointing at thujone, a terpenoid found in wormwood oil. Besides lending absinthe its particular flavor, thujone has the ability to bind to receptors in our brain – gamma-aminobutyric acid A receptors or GABAA receptors – which can bring on a number of brain disorders.

Towards the end of the 18th century, Switzerland was the major supplier of absinthe but its abuse spread fast around the rest of Europe and America. Like opium, it became popular amongst artists and writers probably because of its antidepressant qualities and its ability to provoke hallucinations, besides the popular misbelief that the concoction had aphrodisiac attributes. The beverage became an icon of the Bohemian style of life and, in Paris, the end of afternoon apéritif was commonly known as l’heure verte . Strangely enough, though absinthe was dubbed la fée verte, in Switzerland it was – and still is – called la bleue. By the end of the 19th century, hoards of criminal acts and psychic disorders were blamed on the abusive intake of absinthe and, by 1910, it was banned altogether in most European countries and America. Despite this, Switzerland has continued to produce the liquor illegally and it has always been possible to find some through the friend of a friend of someone who knows of a hidden distillery.

The symptoms brought on by an exaggerated consumption of absinthe came to be known as ‘absinthism’, which may not be so far removed from its cousin ‘alcoholism’. Absinthism was associated with gastrointestinal problems, auditory and visual hallucinations, epilepsy, brain damage, an increased risk of psychiatric illnesses and suicide. However, in time it has become apparent that the effects of ethanol – found in greater quantities than wormwood oil in absinthe – are just as damaging and that no doubt the combination of wormwood oil, or its toxic component thujone, coupled with ethanol is to blame.

So what is it that makes thujone toxic to our system? GABAA receptors are scattered all over our brain on the surface of postsynaptic neurons. Their ligands – the GABA neurotransmitters – are natural inhibitors of nerve impulses; without them neurons go haywire and signals are fired off unhindered. When GABA binds to its receptor, what it does is trigger off an electric signal which is relayed down the length of the neuron. If any thujone is around however, it will bind to the GABAA receptor and stop any transmission. And what happens then? Convulsions. In fact, it is now known that many natural or synthetic convulsive agents block GABA-mediated inhibition.

How is this electric signal relayed? Besides playing the role of receptor, GABAA receptors are also ion channels. A brief description of its 3D structure will help to understand. GABAA receptors are pentamers of three kinds of subunits: two alphas, two betas and a gamma. Each subunit has an extracellular domain sporting a number of loops which form the GABAA receptor site. Further down are the transmembrane regions which are arranged as alpha helical rods. The binding of GABA to the receptor site results in a rearrangement of the alpha helical rods which open up to form a channel through which ions can pass.

How this conformational change happens is not yet clear but researchers think that when GABA binds to the loops, these take on a slightly different structure causing them to bend over and couple with specific domains in the transmembrane region. In turn, this coupling brings on structural changes to the alpha helices which open out to form a pore. Such a mechanistic interpretation of neurotransmission seems sensible from an energy point of view since the process is fast and reversible. Any greater structure movement would be too demanding.

So, GABA opens up the channel. What does thujone, the active substance of wormwood do? What probably happens is that the opening of the channel is prevented so that the ions cannot flow through. Hence the message is not sent off and nerve impulse transmission is not constrained.

Wormwood oil has been used for millennia as a means of alleviating digestive pains caused by gastrointestinal worms. It is also used as an insect repellent. How does it work? There are great chances that the active ingredient of wormwood oil, thujone, is toxic in the same way to insects and worms as it is to humans and that they too are subjected to convulsive fits when thujone binds to the brain GABA receptors. A number of inherited mutations within the GABA receptors are associated with human diseases and, not surprisingly, GABA receptors are the site of action of many drugs of current clinical importance. So a keener understanding of their function is essential. We already know that the alpha and beta subunits are essential for ligand binding, and the beta unit is not only important for ligand recognition but also has a role in the ‘loop-transmembrane’ coupling process.

Regrettably, perhaps, as the ban on absinthe is being raised and the accusative finger on its toxicity lowered, some historians believe that a nation’s folklore will suffer. In the past 100 years – like anything banned – absinthe had become a forbidden fruit and many tales were told around the dinner table as one sipped at an illegal bleue. And need it be stressed that a forbidden fruit you pluck from a tree is far tastier than the one you pick from a bowl?

And because it used to be CHEAP.

And the stuff tastes like shit - the Scope comment is exactly right - so there's no reason to drink it at all if you have the money for good drugs and liquor.

Antidepressant? Wonder how that works?

Bumping cuz it made me chuckle.

Probably what's kept me from becoming an alcoholic is the allergies. I rarely drink because of them. But I concur with those who don't understand keeping unopened bottles of drink for long periods of time.

I can't even keep a box of ice cream unopened for a day, let alone booze.

While The Changes and my band were recording in adjacent studios, they shared their bottle of absinthe with us and it made for a really interesting evening. Overall, it's a really pleasant high in small doses, but I don't like drinking it to excess. Too expensive energetically.

Also, reading the original article brings the song Kid Charlemagne to mind.