Absinthe! Three-day hangover! Oh yeah!

Somewhat inspired by Tom, I bought a whole bunch of bottles of pretty good quality absinthe at an auction recently.


It runs at a pretty handy 70% alcohol a.b.v. and is dangerously quaffable. This I found out the hard way.

Saturday night Ms. K and I were heading to a party and then a gig and I was feeling nervous, thirsty and hot. What better to do, reasoned I then, than sink a few absinthes. That, as the man said, was my mistake.

And so what better excuse, reason I now -- more than a little inspired by Che -- than to for posterity put together a quick'n'dirty "Quick 'N' Dirty Absinthe Drinking" instructional.

[1] You're gonna need a nice straight tumbler, capacity ~200ml. (In case you were wondering, ~ means approximately.) If you have a proper absinthe glass, then more power to ya, use that instead, but more than likely you don't. Have a proper absinthe glass. That is. Unless you want to buy one from an expensive website.

Anyway, what ever you use, pour about 1/2 a glass of absinthe (~100 ml) into the glass.


[2] You're also going to need a small water jug (the small bit is important), a cube of sugar, and an absinthe spoon. The absinthe spoon (my les fleches replica spoon clumsily quick'n'dirtily rendered in pen and ink, above) is also important, and you're even less likely to have that than an absinthe glass. Unless you're me, and you have a spoon but not a glass. Because some douchebag broke it a few months ago, and has resisted all your attempts at dropping increasingly heavy hints about how he should replace it.
That's ok -- use an absinthe spoon, use a teaspoon, it doesn't really matter. This is the Quick 'N' Dirty instructional, and you'll soon get the hang of it.

Arrange spoon on top of glass, arrange sugar cube 'pon that.


[3] Delicately, and slowly, pour (ha ha ha) distilled water from water jug (that's me, below -- I'm using the milk jug from my awesome stainless-steel tea set) onto the sugar cube. Gradually the sugar cube will fall all apart and through the spoon and into the drink -- hopefully by about the same time that the liquid level in your glass reaches the (imaginary) 85% full mark (imaginarily inscribed on the glass).
Yeah, like I said, do it SLOWLY. See why you need a SMALL water-jug? You can't delicately dribble water over a sugar cube with a two-litre beer pitcher now, can you? You do NOT want to fill up and overflow your glass before your sugar cube is broke-up. Trust me on that.

Oh, "(ha ha ha) distilled water" means "go ahead, use distilled water if you want. Or you could buy some fucken (still) Perrier, or Pump, or something, or else you could boil tapwater and chill it, or else... you could just use tapwater. Remember, quick'n'dirty."


[4] Righty. Sugar cube gone-burger, now stir the resultant mixture with the absinthe spoon a bit. And drink. (*1)

See how the liquid in the glass has gone all cloudy? (Above, represented using a PhotoShop overlay and pencil scribble). That's good. That's what happens when the water chemically reacts with the oils in the absinthe. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if your absinthe and water mixture has not gone cloudy, you should immediately pour it and the rest of the bottle of absinthe down the nearest sink, and smack your self over the head for buying cheap muck.


[5] Repeat.


Note *1: Getting back to Saturday night, if you have followed the instructional, you have successfully diluted 140 proof absinthe with a roughly-equivalent quantity of water. You now have an ~200ml glassful of a beverage which is ~35% alcohol; that is, of only slightly-less potency than a standard spirit.

You can see where this is going, can't you? No? Well, to cut a long story short, over the course of an hour I sank four or five of these glassfuls. Then we went to the party. We had great fun, dancing to Le Tigre and the Slits and so on. Then we left there after about an hour, and stopped in at home on the way to the gig, where I began to be violently ill, and passed out.

I know that from time to time I have been known to get completely fucked-up and have a right old go, but I haven't got drunk and vomited for about.. I dunno.. 15 years? Sheesh.

At some point on Sunday, I was able clear my head sufficiently well enough to calculate that in the course of that terrible hour, I'd drunk the approximate equivalent of four bottles of regular wine.

It's Tuesday and I'm still hanged over.

Ouch.