Absinthe Taste Test: Are New Brands the Real Deal?
A second brand of wormwood absinthe has been approved for U.S. sale (Lucid being the first). Yves Kubler, the fourth-generation distiller of Swiss Absinthe Superieure Kubler, told us he got permission to import his product after five years of haggling with the U.S. government (the turning point was when the Swiss embassy intervened). All the while, he says, he refused to tweak the recipe from what his family produced in 1875. For help determining which brand is more worthy of ingestion (and to gauge their authenticity), we invited the Green Fairy, an underground authority who for years has sold his own home-brewed absinthe in elaborate kits, to taste-test them. Are either of them good enough to put him out of business?