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You have to distill it again after using the Green Devil product or it will taste like wormwood and make all of your friends hate you for asking them to drink it. I learned the hard way in 2005. By the way, if anybody's going to Burning Man this year, we have a WWI-themed root beer and absinthe salo...

Don't use anise post distillation. How fresh is the batch? The distillate is often flat and/or muted right out of the still. Interesting point about the distillate being muted. I did the post-distillation anise experiment and it worked out great, except it's a little murky and there's sediment form...

So.... how long to you guys macerate both the wormwood and the other ingredients? I have literally found anything form 4 hours to 10 days. just curious. I do 7-10 for the first maceration in a jar in a cool place and for the second it's usually a day or two. Anything under a few days would require ...

100L? Surely you mean 100mL haha. As far as cascade, I have been referred there several times, but at 15 dollars an OUNCE thats a very expensive venture. I am sure Mountain Herbs is just whole dried plant at 7$ a lb. I am sure cascade would be a good place for Pontica, being as it is used in such s...

I have a weird situation where it louches better than any previous batch, but I can't taste the anise. I'm presently trying to rectify the flavor by using green anise (and two stars. I'm cheating) in a teabag, post-coloration. Made me wonder, though, if it's possible to produce substitute tails. For...

Zman wrote:If you like Lucid, hang on to your hat, you ain't seen nothing yet. There will be at least two coming out by summer from the State of Washington that will be even more true to the original Belle Epoque absinthe.

Really? Washington?! What brands?

-cx
Washington

Was there ever a consensus on if this was good wormwood or not? If not, anyone have any new good sources? Also, on a run of litre of alcohol, approx how much tails should be collected? Maybe I skimmed over the answer in all the threads I have read, but I don't recollect it. P.S. This is my first po...

Great story. I had a similar experience with absinthe a couple of weeks ago. There's a guy known here and even in surrounding states for his absinthe. I tried his once, knew it was distilled, but it still tasted like wormwood. Whatever...better than mine. Met him again recently and happened to have ...

Thanks for the reply. It sounds like I want to avoid the GD kit. One thing I'm confused about, you list the price of Grand wormwood as $1.40 an ounce. Cascade wants $10. and ounce, plus shipping. $15.00 for Roman, plus shipping. The recipe listed here calls for a little over 1.5 oz Grand wormwood. ...

Does anyone know anything about the Green Devil kits? I was thinking that they were cheap, compared to buying herbs separately. I was thinking about buying their refill kit and using it to distill with. Any word on this? Yeah, in the words of the Terminator, "I have detailed files." I hav...

Previously I used a small handful glass marbles. The apparatus was a 2L flask in a double-boiler (on an electric stove.) After knocking around on the bottom for a bit they pitted up nicely, and so they worked better the next time. The problem is that it left little pieces of glass at the bottom and ...

The stuff that's left in the still after you're done with a run is usually called backset or stillage ... a couple other names for it out there too. The tails are the portion of distalate that come directly after the hearts in a run. This is usually decided on by flavor by the person making the run...

Hey, all. Novice question here with regard to absinthe. In terms of the "tails" of absinthe, would that be the water and herbs left over in the pot after the distillation, or is that the last 100ml or so of the actual distillate itself? (Where it starts to smell and taste different just be...

I realize that good Absinthe is better than what is common over here, but it is the bitter stuff available here that these people are raving about. My comments are not so much in reference to Absinthe in general as they are to the people who are talking about poorly made Absinthe (usually from an i...

Properly made absinthe is not nasty tasting. I completely agree. Americans don't typically drink anise-flavored beverages so it's a switch for many, but the drink itself is a whole hell of a lot easier on the palate than most gin or tequila (a better analog would be 151 rum, since they are closer i...

"For 11 years Winters experimented, adding a little of this and little of that. No matter how close he came to perfection, each new batch had to be dumped down the drain to comply with federal dictate" *cough* I assure you all that every drop of my experiments get flushed, too. -cx (*bathr...

On a lighter note, thank you goes out to TheScrin for his recipe. This is the type of help i was talking about. I didn't know that Melissa was Lemon balm, now i know. Check out Wikipedia. That's what I did. Seriously, though, the Wormwood Society has some good 1855 recipes that give you a decent re...

You "can" send it through the mail just about the same as anybody who gets a bottle of European absinthe does. I think if it's over some proof (140 or 150 IIRC) the USPS can legally confiscate it. I sent a 250ml sample to a stateside Marine with the cork duct-taped on, the bottle wrapped i...