Absinthe at Pour in Mount Kisco

Posted by: Liz Johnson - Posted in pour, Restaurants, tastings on Dec 10, 2008

I tasted the green fairy last night at Pour in Mount Kisco, in a comfortable room with a knowledgable guide and a beautiful fountain.

The green fairy, as Absinthe is sometimes called, is a highly alcoholic liquor that tastes mostly of anise. And alcohol, which is why it is usually diluted with water and sugar. Until last year, it was illegal in the U.S. because one of its ingredients was thought to be to make people insane. (Apparently this guy in Switzerland once went on an absinthe bender and murdered his family.)

There is other lore to the drink (that one of its ingredients is wormwood, an herb from the tarragon family; that Oscar Wilde once said he felt like tulips were growing out of his legs after drinking it), and I’ll get into that in a moment. But mostly what we learned last night at Pour — yes, this was an organized tasting — was that absinthe is about ritual. Look at the elaborate fountain.

There were four brands of Absinthe: Absent, La Fee (the oldest of the new and the most popular), Lucia and La Muse Verte:

James Bumbery, the director of training at the New York Bartending School, was our leader. He sat down in the corner of the front room at Pour — an adorable wine bar in an old Victorian on Main Street — and started class by asking what we already knew about absinthe.

Anthony Colascacco, owner of Pour, introduces James:

James begins class:

The group was mostly women (guys! good place to meet them, I’d say!):

A few people knew some things about the green fairy: the wormwood connection. that is was illegal. James enlightened us on its history. Pernod was among the first companies to bottle it; around the turn of the century it was the most popular liquors in France (36 million liters per year); that Vincent Van Vogh was an imbiber of it; that people have used it to try to cure everything from farting dogs to the plague; that is also became popular in New Orleans (heard of the Absinthe House?); and that it is made with wormwood, fennel and anise.

Then he asked us to taste it. Straight.

Cough. Burn. “It hurts!” said one taster. People made very funny faces.

Most people don’t drink it straight. It is used in many cocktails however. James had the Savoy Cocktail Book, which gives hundreds of recipes for cocktails made with absinthe, including one called the Earthquake, which James shook up after the tasting. (And before, truth be told.) They call it an Earthquake, he said, because if one happens while you’re drinking it you won’t even notice.

But the traditional ritual of absinthe is to dilute it with sugar and water. You don’t just open a packet of Splenda and take your glass to the sink. You place a cube of sugar on a delicate slotted spoon, balance that over the glass and drip the water in, drop by drop. See here?

The glasses have their sugar cubes and are placed under the fountain.

There are also individual absinthe glasses, called balanciers, shown here:

You place the sugar cube on the spoon under the shot glass-looking thing and then fill the shot glass with water. A mechanism that goes tick-tock like a metronome controls the slow drip. As the booze fills with water it turns cloudy.

Once the liquor is diluted it is much softer. It tastes like a more intense Pastis or Herbsaint. You get tons of anise and fennel flavor, but also some of the other bitters-y flavors, too. It looks milky and has a mouthfeel like that too. Not nearly as astrigent as when it’s straight.

We sipped and talked and talked and sipped. And James said that’s what absinthe is all about: bringing people together.