Absinthe: The Mystery of the Green Menace

[apothecary]

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.11/a...w=wn_tophead_11

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.

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."

Breaux became a connoisseur at a young age. He was shelling out a hundred bucks for cognac and mystifying his college buddies by bringing Martell Cordon Bleu to parties. So it's no wonder that, a decade later, immersed in the history and makeup of absinthe, he was eager to taste the stuff. But it was nearly impossible to find. He had to content himself with its paraphernalia. While walking through the French Quarter one Saturday morning a decade ago, he spotted an absinthe spoon in the window of an antique shop. The slotted, sieve-like device was an essential part of the ritual of preparing the drink: You placed a sugar cube on the spoon and slowly poured cold water through it to dilute the strong liqueur. Breaux started stockpiling absinthe accessories, but this proved to be a frustrating tease. "It was like having a pipe but nothing to smoke."

So Breaux decided to make some himself. He found a French-language history book with "pre-ban protocols," a vague description of how absinthe was made back before it was outlawed. Armed with the protocols, he prepared a batch in the lab. The result? "Not very good," he concedes. "I couldn't imagine that being the most popular liqueur in France."

He got his chance to taste the real thing in 1996, when a friend spotted a bottle marked "old French liquor" at an estate sale. They were asking $300, and Breaux, seeing it was a vintage Spanish Pernod Tarragona absinthe, immediately wrote a check. When he got it to his lab, he plunged a syringe through the cork, extracted one precious sip, and downed it. "It had a honeyed texture, distinct herbal and floral notes, and a gentle roundness uncharacteristic of such a strong liquor," he says. "Those protocols were crap."

Breaux wasn't the only one rediscovering the long-banned beverage. In Europe, food regulations adopted by the EU in 1988 had neglected to mention absinthe, and when they superseded national laws, the drink was effectively re-legalized. New distilleries were popping up all over Europe, selling what Breaux dismisses as "mouthwash and vodka in a bottle, with some aromatherapy oil." Absinthe had disappeared so completely for so long that no one knew how to make it anymore. Including Breaux, who continued trying to reverse engineer it in his lab.

The new absinthes became popular among hipsters, just as the drink had been 125 years before. But now the presence of thujone was a selling point. Marilyn Manson boasted of recording an album while "on" absinthe. Johnny Depp compared its effects to marijuana. "Drink too much," he said, "and you suddenly realize why Van Gogh cut off his ear."

This wasn't just idle celebrity conjecture. In a 1989 Scientific American article, an American biochemist named Wilfred Arnold hypothesized that Van Gogh's insanity (acute intermittent porphyria, he speculated) was caused by the thujone in absinthe. Based on the description of raw materials used to make the liqueur, Arnold calculated that the thujone content was a dangerous 250 parts per million. "I would advise not drinking it," he says.

Breaux rejects Arnold's methodology. "He didn't take the effects of the distillation process into account," Breaux says. "He made a WAG - a wild-assed guess." Breaux wanted to settle the thujone question once and for all. And he was uniquely positioned to do so. "Back when the original was around, they didn't have any decent analytical chemistry. And when Arnold performed his research, he didn't have any samples of the original liqueur. I have both," he says.

At the EASI lab, Breaux ran tests on the pre-ban absinthe samples, as well as on samples spiked with thujone (from the very bottle I had sniffed). This allowed him to isolate the toxic compound. He spent his free time studying the test results, and late one night in June 2000 he had his answer. "I was stunned. Everything that I had been told was complete nonsense." In the antique absinthes he had collected, the thujone content was an order of magnitude smaller than Arnold's predictions. In many instances, it was a homeopathically minuscule 5 parts per million.

Breaux went public with his findings, but not in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. "Here I am with just a bachelor's in microbiology. I knew I could be tarred and feathered." Instead, he posted his test results in the discussion threads at La Fee Verte, an online gathering place for absinthe geeks. Flame wars erupted, and Breaux cited his research to buttress his point about thujone concentrations. The site's moderator eventually dubbed him "elite absinthe enforcer."

Breaux's conclusions were vindicated in early 2005, when a food-safety group working for the German government tested pre-ban absinthe. Dirk Lachenmeier, who ran the study (called "Thujone - Cause of Absinthism?") concluded that absinthe is not any more harmful than other spirit drinks. But the biggest vindication came at the Absinth des Jahres contest in 2004, for which expert judges sampled newly distilled absinthes from all over the world. A little-known candidate, Nouvelle-Orléans, garnered perfect scores and won a gold medal. "Without doubt, the release of Nouvelle-Orléans was a milestone in the history of modern absinthe," says Arthur Frayn, one of the judges. The distiller? Ted Breaux.

"You can read a paragraph or two on how to make wine, but that doesn't mean you're going to make Chateau Latour," says Breaux. "What I've done is, I've made a Chateau Latour." In the process of proving that absinthe wasn't insanity-inducing poison, he had cracked its code. He'd sourced the concentrations of all the herbs it contained and even traced them to their original regions of cultivation. He knew precisely which classes of wine spirits those herbs were combined with. Making and marketing his own brand was the next logical step. "Nouvelle-Orléans is part vintage absinthe, part Ted Breaux, and part New Orleans flair," he says.

Nouvelle-Orléans is just one absinthe formulation Breaux has mastered. He also makes re-creations of pre-ban bottles. He shows me one that he just distilled, based on an Edouard Pernod absinthe, and I'm dying to taste it. Breaux begins to prepare it in the traditional French manner, a process as intricate as a tea ceremony. First he decants a couple of ounces into two widemouthed glasses specially made for the drink. A strong licorice aroma wafts across the table. Then he adds 5 or 6 ounces of ice-cold water, letting it trickle through a silver dripper into the glass. "Pour it slowly," he says. "That's the secret to making it taste good. If the water's too warm, it will taste like donkey piss."

The drink turns milky, and a condensate floats to the top. This is called the louche, a word that's come to mean "disreputable." Breaux hands it to me and tells me there's no need to stir away the louche or add sugar to an absinthe this fine. I take a sip. The flavor is subtle, dry, complex. It makes my tongue feel a little numb.

"It's like an herbal speedball," he says. "Some of the compounds are excitatory, some are sedative. That's the real reason artists liked it. Drink two or three glasses and you can feel the effects of the alcohol, but your mind stays clear - you can still work."

Breaux is on his second glass, and I'm still finishing my first as he brings me up to speed on the latest developments in his ongoing absinthe detective story - if most of the thujone isn't present in the drink, where has it gone? "My initial estimation was that it's left behind in the distillation process. But now, I think it probably evaporates out of the Artemisia absinthium when it dries," he says.

I take a few swallows from my second glass of the 140-proof liquor with increasingly unsteady hands. "Americans drink to get drunk," observes Breaux. "Whereas in France, getting drunk is just a consequence of sampling too much wine you really like." I'm starting to feel very, very French.

In between hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Ted Breaux went back to New Orleans. He snuck past two police checkpoints and into the Gentilly Terrace neighborhood to survey the damage to his home. Its contents were destroyed, and it reeked of sewage and rot. The house will need to be bulldozed. Breaux says he won't rebuild on that spot, which is 8 feet below sea level. But neither will he flee the city where his family has lived for 200 years. "I just don't know what's going to happen next."

One thing Breaux knows is that his work with absinthe will go on. Nouvelle-Orléans is distilled in France and sold only in Europe. Absinthe is still illegal in the US under FDA regulations. ("But American connoisseurs are able to find it," he says cryptically.) Breaux supervises its production in the small Loire Valley town of Saumur, at a beautiful old distillery with ironwork by Gustave Eiffel and 125-year-old absinthe-making equipment. He struck a deal with the Combier family, which owns the factory. "I said, let me distill here, and I'll help you create new liqueurs," Breaux says.

Later this year, the partners will release their latest innovation - a liqueur made from tobacco. Specifically, a strong, spicy strain of tobacco called Perique, which Breaux claims is the world's rarest commercial crop. "It's grown on one 15-acre plot in south Louisiana, near Convent." Tobacco beverages are tricky to prepare - and even more scarce than absinthe. After all, as Breaux explains, "nicotine is toxic if it's ingested."

[sobriquet]

Later this year, the partners will release their latest innovation - a liqueur made from tobacco. Specifically, a strong, spicy strain of tobacco called Perique, which Breaux claims is the world's rarest commercial crop. "It's grown on one 15-acre plot in south Louisiana, near Convent." Tobacco beverages are tricky to prepare - and even more scarce than absinthe. After all, as Breaux explains, "nicotine is toxic if it's ingested."

Interesting article, but that last sentence of that paragraph just completely trashes this guy's credibility in my view. Such utter crap it's laughable.

That's why peope smoke, snuff, or chew (mouth mucous membrane absorption) tobacco. Nicotine is broken down and completely inactive through the gastrointestinal system and liver's first pass metabolism.

Otherwise you'd hear more about people eating cigarettes to commit suicide.

_________

Edited/deleted section on ingestion and amount due to real danger of dose indicated.

Edited August 13, 2006 by eNo

[Torsten]

Actually, everything in that last paragraph is spot on. It is easy to overdose on oral tobacco, especially extracts. Do a search on 'chimo' and 'tobacco paste' on these forums. I even once overdosed on it while boiling the pot (nicotine freebase steam distills). A nicotine spirit would be incredibly dangerous unless the nicotine dose ratio is kept below the fatal alcohol dose, but then you would not get a lot of buzz from a single shot either (due to the low safety margin).

I presume his work on perique is more due to the amazing flavour of this incredibly rare and yummy tobacco. Many of the flavours would cross in the distillation, but only a maximum of 30% of the nicotine (the rest is present as salt and hence will not distill). In fact, dried tobacco often has very little freebase nicotine left as much of it evaporates or decomposes in the drying/curing process.

Oral nicotine was a popular suicide and homicide poison in some countries where it was freely available as a pesticide. In fact, it is an excellent pesticide, but has been removed from most markets due to safety concerns.

[MORG]

Yeah, interesting article.

Has anyone here ever produced a batch of absinthe themselves that was more than "mouthwash and vodka in a bottle, with some aromatherapy oil."?

[Maturin]

Has anyone here ever produced a batch of absinthe themselves that was more than "mouthwash and vodka in a bottle, with some aromatherapy oil."?

No, but I've paid a lot of money for "mouthwash and vodka in a bottle, with some aromatherapy oil".

[Torsten]

I forgot to mention that the subject of this article was I think also the subject of a foreign correspondent segment last week. The distillery he works in is stunning. That's unless there are more than one distillery with ironwork designed by Eiffel (as in Eiffel Tower).

I am a little dubious about his reconstitution of 'original absinthe'. That would be like finding a bottle of fosters in 200 years and making it the epitome of beers . It would be good to know a little more about the pre-ban absinthe brands he uses as his yardstick. Quite a few absinthe recipes demand fresh wormwood, so these would also contain a much lartger amount of thujone. Not that thujone has to be the active constituent, but his reasoning does little to sway me one way or the other. Personally I think things like calamus and melissa are much more likely candidates.

[sobriquet]

Actually, everything in that last paragraph is spot on. It is easy to overdose on oral tobacco, especially extracts. Do a search on 'chimo' and 'tobacco paste' on these forums. I even once overdosed on it while boiling the pot (nicotine freebase steam distills). A nicotine spirit would be incredibly dangerous unless the nicotine dose ratio is kept below the fatal alcohol dose, but then you would not get a lot of buzz from a single shot either (due to the low safety margin).

Hi Torsten. Trans-dermal, trans-buccal, nasal, or lung absorption notwithstanding tobacco is not really active through the stomach.

Nicotine is metabolised by the liver and nicotine is not absorbed by the acid environment of the stomach. It can be absorbed by the small intestine, but it is hitting the liver as soon as it is absorbed and one would require pretty large doses to become toxic by swallowing. This is especially so with a full stomach where the absorption would be considerably slower. The drug also stimulates the vomiting centre which results in gastric emptying.

Much of the data on nicotine and its toxicity are sketchy. They talk of half lives between 30 mins and 2 hours.

See the following which probably contains the most useful data I've seen on tobacco toxicity.

Although ingestions of tobacco are common, deaths due to ingestion of tobacco

are extremely rare, due to early vomiting and first pass metabolism

of the nicotine which is absorbed.

from http://www.cdc.gov/Tobacco/sgr/sgr_1988/19...ppendix%20B.pdf

So it is "extremely rare" despite ingestion. In the case of smokers it would be even more difficut since they develop tolerance to the effects very quickly.

So while it's not quite as innocuous as I've made out, it's certainly not as dramatic as the last line of "nicotine is toxic if it's ingested". Nicorette chewers are ingesting it all the time.

Edited August 13, 2006 by eNo

[Torsten]

wait till you get hold of some pituri to chew. I think you will change your mind.

[sobriquet]

wait till you get hold of some pituri to chew. I think you will change your mind.

I did find your pesticide fact quite interesting though. There's no doubt pure nicotine would be extremely dangerous and spilling it on one's clothes even could be a serious issue due to transdermal absorption.

It's before my time so I wasn't aware of this use at all.

[Torsten]

it was commonly used as a homicide poison in bitter drinks and medicines.

[oxydiser]

The paper quotes a lethal dose of 40-60mg via the oral route, that sounds pretty toxic to me

[sobriquet]

The paper quotes a lethal dose of 40-60mg via the oral route, that sounds pretty toxic to me

The 40-60mg dose is the one that is bandied about without much real evidence for it. The paper mentions that as well as what I have quoted above, that actual deaths are extremely rare due to the vomiting and first pass metabolism through the liver. It's the rate of absorption that counts.

Reminds me of the practice of some African tribes for their version of "the trial by ordeal" with the Calabar or esere bean which contains the alkaloid eserine now known as physostigmine.

The innocent man who drank down the potion, knowing that he was free of guilt got a sudden high dose which stimulated violent vomiting which purged him of the otherwise lethal dose. The guilty man on the other hand would tend to sip it slowly progressively poisoning himself with the eventually lethal dose.

[wandjina]

According to the poisons information line, and numerous journal articles (see below), tobacco/cigarettes are potentially dangerous if eaten. My daughter snarfed down a handful of butts when she was about a year old....good ol' Dad leaft an ashtray in easy reach.

Luckily they were cardboard 'roaches', and went right through...but apparently just a few conventional butts or a couple ciggarettes can make a toddler very ill, and poisoned pets are not uncommon either.

Hulzebos CV. Walhof C. de Vries TW.

Academisch Ziekenhuis, Beatrix Kinderkliniek, Groningen.

Accidental ingestion of cigarettes by children. [Review]

Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde. 142(47):2569-71, 1998 Nov 21.

Abstract

Accidental ingestion of cigarettes (and butts) is mainly seen in young children. Nicotine in tobacco products is easily absorbed by the oral mucosa and intestines; absorption depends on nicotine content and pH of tobacco. Symptoms are caused by the nicotine component and usually develop rapidly (< 4 hours). The most common symptom is vomiting. Although cigarettes are potentially toxic, their ingestion by children is generally benign. Decontamination of the mouth with water may be useful. Induction of emesis is not advised. Gastric lavage is not needed in asymptomatic patients (with an unreliable history) or after vomiting. Children who ingested cigarettes should receive medical observation for four hours after ingestion. Children with significant symptoms should be admitted and eventually treated by supportive care. In symptomatic children or children with a reliable history of ingestion of large quantities who have not vomited gastric lavage with administration of activated charcoal has to be performed. When after vomiting other symptoms persist activated charcoal can be given via a nasogastric tube. [References: 14]

Edited August 14, 2006 by wandjina

[wandjina]

see also:

Grusz-Harday E.

Fatal nicotine poisoning.

Archiv fur Toxikologie. 23(1):35-41, 1967.

Kosa F, Fazekas IG.

Homicide and attempted homicide with nicotine solution mixed into beer.

Orv Hetil. 1972 Aug 26;113(32):1925-7.

Permin H, Wagner P.

Tobacco and murder--the first case of nicotine poisoning proved in a homicide

Ugeskr Laeger. 2002 Dec 16;164(51):6084-5.

(Nicotine poison of choice in Eastern Europe...interesting).

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Nicotine poisoning after ingestion of contaminated ground beef--Michigan, 2003. MMWR - Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report. 52(18):413-6, 2003 May 9.

Takayasu T. Ohshima T. Lin Z. Nishigami J. Nakaya T. Maeda H. Tanaka N.

An autopsy case of fatal nicotine poisoning.

Nippon Hoigaku Zasshi - Japanese Journal of Legal Medicine. 46(5):327-32, 1992 Oct.

Abstract

A fatal case of nicotine poisoning is reported in which a 44-year-old female committed suicide in a short time by taking orally the eluate from tobacco. External examination showed no abnormal findings except for markedly dark red-purple postmortem lividity, and internal examination demonstrated no pathological changes but the signs of sudden death. Through the toxicological investigation by GC and GC-MS, however, nicotine was detected in the solution which she had taken orally and in the blood, urine and the contents of the stomach and small intestine. The nicotine concentrations of the blood, urine and contents of stomach and small intestine were 6.3 micrograms/ml, 1.5 micrograms/ml, 30 micrograms/ml and 71 micrograms/g respectively, and enough to be lethal.

Vig MM.

Nicotine poisoning in a dog.

Veterinary & Human Toxicology. 32(6):573-5, 1990 Dec.

Haruda F.

"Hip-pocket" sign in the diagnosis of nicotine poisoning.

Pediatrics. 84(1):196, 1989 Jul.

Goepferd SJ.

Smokeless tobacco: a potential hazard to infants and children.

Journal of the American Dental Association. 113(1):49-50, 1986 Jul.

Saxena K. Scheman A.

Suicide plan by nicotine poisoning: a review of nicotine toxicity.

Veterinary & Human Toxicology. 27(6):495-7, 1985 Dec.

Abstract

Nicotine is a toxic substance which is readily available from a wide variety of sources. Due to the universal availability of nicotine, the primary care physician may encounter accidental or deliberate poisoning in a variety of clinical settings and should be familiar with diagnosis and management of nicotine toxicity. We report a case in which a depressed patient attempted suicide using nicotine extracted from snuff as a lethal drug. Three other cases illustrating the effects and clinical management of nicotine poisoning are also reviewed. The etiology, diagnosis and management of nicotine overdose are discussed.

Brady ME. Ritschel WA. Saelinger DA. Cacini W. Patterson AJ.

Animal model and pharmacokinetic interpretation of nicotine poisoning in man.

International Journal of Clinical Pharmacology & Biopharmacy. 17(1):12-7, 1979 Jan.

[elzar]

I have been lead to believe that nicotine works as a nerve agent with insects. Is this correct? I would have thought this tobacco flavoured beverage he is looking into would surely increase the potential of addiction to the product if consumed in excess.

[teonanacatl]

Thats interesting he mentioned about the oxidation of absinthe once open. I made some with voldka and fresh wormwood (LOTS) and it tasted like straight wormwood, i also added some dill. I then filtered through charcol. That was 2-3 years ago and the taste and smell has changed. The other night i distilled the brown voldka through slightly fractionating column and got about 400ml of clear but interesting tasting spirit. I love the smell but it definetly aint floral lol. I would like to make some more but will use other herbs as i reckon it would be loverly. Lotus flowers soaked in strong alcohol and distilled could be nice to, mmmm yum. Me thinks i need a large amount of conc EtOH :D

[teonanacatl]

There is two stereoisomers of thujone, perhaps they have different smells as is the case with carvone enantiomers.

[teonanacatl]

for those looking for 95% beverage ethanol CRS sells it

http://www.csrethanol.com.au/

[Torsten]

for those looking for 95% beverage ethanol CRS sells it

http://www.csrethanol.com.au/

Did you just ask them for it, or do you have to go via a distributor, or what?

[teonanacatl]

Haha well I havent enquired about it but it says call for enquires, i was gonna do that later. So maybe they wont sell directly. Lomb scientific sells undenatured EtOH from ajax chemicals for $60 somthing for 10L, MSDS says nothing about benzene etc but one would need to check.

[Torsten]

Lomb scientific sells undenatured EtOH from ajax chemicals for $60 somthing for 10L, MSDS says nothing about benzene etc but one would need to check.

Almost any chem supplier stocks it, but they will only sell to people who have an ethanol license. I offered to pay the taxed price, but apparently they are not allowed to sell it that way (requires liquor license or some shit).

[spiders]

'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?'

As far as I was aware thujone was a neuro-toxin/irritant that caused seizures at dosages miles higher than any Absinthe recipe ever contains and Ive never read one record of it being a renal-toxin. Infact, horses who ate nothing but common sage for four weeks became prone to seizures from apparent thujone poisoning, suffered body tremors, and would fall down on their side constantly - after being withdrawn from the thujone containing plant they returned to normal health very quickly.

Thujone being the active ingrediant in Absinthe is one of the oldest, and most irritating myths ive encountered. The only active absinthes around have relatively low levels of thujone, and relatively high levels of fennels and other herbs, suggesting that the actives ingrediants come from these herbs.

[hairyplant]

ohhh absintha, tu es una cosa de los locisimos. donde era mi cabeza?

I had a full on experience with true full strength abstinthe while i was living in Spain last year (where it is freely available in most bars). One night, silly little aussie me sucked in by a group of nasty espanoles and dutch crazies, decided to head to the local shot bar for some absinthe (after a good 6-7 hours of hard drinking).

1st shot: yeah i was doing fine, tastes like rocket fuel, but hey i read if you hold it in your mouth it heightens the hallucinogenic experience... cool, next shot yeah bring it on....

2nd shot: held it in my mouth for as long as i could and let it down... wow mouths burning but numb at the same time, fuck though that tastes foul.

after 3rd, 4th, 5th shots: same method, my god, senses are now totally fucked up, sounds swirling but vision is kinda ok, hmm swaying like a mother fucker though and not to sure how i got here, or how many of those i actually just drank... hmmm better go outside for some fresh air.

I remember very little else of the night other than being carried home and waking up in my apartment totally relieved of all body fluids, and still being violently ill and with serious stomach/abdomial pain. I have since seen a video of myself in the gutter out the front of the shot bar (that's when you know your friends are looking after you!!!), and while it is amuseing to see myself mumbling stumbling loudly and with the greatest vigour of a spastic drunk, was not pretty due to the projectiles pouring from out of my mouth in between words.

As i am now, I could not put her anywhere near the back of my throat without (i have since tried). Just the smell of it and errrrr,

All I can say is if you’re gonna be drinking heavily and consuming full strength (70%+ alcohol) thujone containing absinthe, be very careful, as all control and memory can be taken from the experience quite easily (sounds obvious but hey, dont be too confident!). And do it in a familiar setting

(please note memory of actual shot number is majorly limited, but the number mentioned is probably an under estimate).

[apothecary]

bm if you read it closer it says "reputed to be" ...not is...and then further down in the article it states the concentration in an original bottle tested by chromatography was tiny.

[spiders]

My bad. Your right.

That beind said, after trying a number of spanish varieties reputed to have the 'highest thujone content on the market' I can tell you that it isnt thujone. Infact to me it just felt like 'pre-pissed' - the period of time before the full impact of the extremely high alcohol content. I feel the same when i used to drink Grappa.

The Czech absinthes were the best in my opinion - but ive read they include over 20 herbs so who knows which one provides a possible sublte feeling.