Assembling Your Absinthe Bouquet

Anise, fennel, and wormwood are obligatory in absinthe. Beyond those, you’ll have some decisions to make when it comes to designing your bouquet of botanicals.

“In absinthe distillation, it’s a large amount of green aniseed, fennel seed, and star anise,” says Aaron Selya, director of operations at Philadelphia Distilling. “All contribute different levels of complexity to that anethole flavor, with the grand wormwood, as well.”

Selya also uses spearmint, hyssop, and lemon balm. At Wollersheim in Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin, distiller Tom Lenerz adds coriander, angelica, lavender, and lemongrass.

T.A. Breaux, the absinthe revivalist behind Jade Liqueurs, says the botanicals are where distillers can flex some creative muscles—by including nontraditional botanicals such as yuzu, for example. Sourcing botanicals from different regions is another way to provide subtle, distinctive character.

[PAYWALL]

Process Choices

If you’re going with a colored absinthe—verte or rouge—you need to add botanicals at two stages in the production process: the distillation and a post-distillation steep.

Of course, even the distillation stage can range from straightforward to multilayered.

“Here we keep things real simple,” says Nate Newbrough, head distiller at Great Lakes Distillery in Milwaukee. “I know there are places that do more of a fractional distillation, where you get distillate from each individual element and then blend them back together. I take a different approach, where I put together a recipe and macerate it all together and then distill that off as one.” Newbrough sees this method as more cooking-based than science-based. To him, it’s important to be able to recognize the combined flavors and where they are in the distillation process.

At Philadelphia, Selya says the team adds 150 pounds of botanicals to their 1,500-liter pot with alcohol and water. “We let it macerate, rehydrate, and extract overnight,” he says. “The next day we crank up the steam, bring it up to a boil, and start distillation.” The cold-maceration process—letting those botanicals steep before distillation—tends to take 24 hours; that’s what Wollersheim does, while Stoutridge Distillery & Winery in Marlboro, New York, takes one to two days.

At Wollersheim, the distillation stage is a two-parter. “The first distillation brings it to around 140 proof, which would be our standard brandy-/whiskey-proof range,” Lenerz says. “A second distillation is where we push the proof up past 160, making another set of cuts to clean up the spirit some more and make it slightly more neutral.”

At Stoutridge, co-owner Stephen Osborn starts with his brandy base in a copper-pot still with a five-plate column. “Then, I take some of that base brandy and put it into another still,” he says. “It’s maybe at 158 proof, and the neutral spirit I make off of it is typically 192 proof. … I played around a lot with how much brandy versus how much neutral spirit and got it pretty much to a fifty-fifty blend.”

An Unconventional Pot

Once Osborn has this brandy and neutral-spirit base combination, he reaches a crucial element of his process—the decision to distill that base in a wooden alembic still. Copper-pot stills are more common with contemporary absinthe for the same reasons that they are with other craft spirits.

“Copper lends to distillation because it’s malleable, can heat up and rapidly cool down, and will keep its shape,” says Newbrough at Great Lakes. He adds that copper is reliable for cleaning up your distillate because unwanted flavor compounds bind to the copper and stay in the still, not the escaping vapor.

However, Selya says this property is slightly less necessary with absinthe because it doesn’t have the unwanted sulfur compounds of something like whiskey—yet copper stills are efficient workhorses all the same.

So, what difference does Osborn’s “wood pot” distillation still make?

“When I started making absinthe on a wooden still, it was a revelation,” he says. “It makes the absinthe worth the trouble of making that good base.” Copper is necessary initially, he says, to get rid of certain compounds in the brandy and neutral spirit. “What’s going into the wooden still has already seen the copper.”

On the wooden still, the lyne arm and condensers are copper, too—but the pot itself is wood. “The problem with copper in the final stage of absinthe is it can be destructive of flavor,” Osborn says. “It oxidizes out those nitrogenated compounds, [but] when you oxidize flavor, it’s not so hot.”

Osborn has an analogy for how the wood pot saves the flavors at this stage: “If you’re cooking on a stove, you put in spices, then typically by the end of the cook … the spices are not quite right,” he says. “So, you do a corrective addition of spices at the end. It’s like a repair, to compensate for flavors lost because you’re using a metal pot. If you’re using ceramic, you notice you don’t need to make that correction.”

Steeping and Resting

The coloring steep follows distillation, and how the distillation goes can determine both the length of steep time of the quantity of botanicals.

For his distillation at Great Lakes, Newbrough uses between three and five pounds of each botanical for his distillation, then anywhere from two ounces to 1.5 pounds of each for the secondary steep. “It all depends on how much distillate you get off that first one,” he says. He typically ends up with 150 to 200 liters of absinthe per batch.

Post-steep, distillers differ on how long a rest the absinthe gets before it’s bottled. Philadelphia’s entire start-to-finish process looks like this:

• They make three batches at a time; Selya says this means three distillations over six days because each distillation requires an overnight maceration.
• On the seventh day, they take all that distillate—“high-proof, uncolored white absinthe from those three distillations”—and put a percentage back into the still and add their coloring botanicals.
• “We heat it up, but instead of distilling it, we take that hot alcohol with the chlorophyll and flavor of botanicals leeched into it, press it, strain it, and put it back into the rest of the clear absinthe from the distillations,” Selya says. “Days eight to 30, we’re letting that freshly colored absinthe rest.”
• During this time, the color settles from a neon green to an earthier hue. The bits of plant matter that survived straining settle to the bottom of the tank so they can be separated out.
• After day 30, the absinthe is filtered and gets a little bit of water, taking it from 140 to 120 proof, where it’s bottled.

At Stoutridge, Osborn’s process ends with an aging period. But first:

• It takes him a day to make the brandy base and another day to take some of that brandy and make a neutral spirit.
• There are one or two days of cold maceration, mixing the two base spirits and adding herbs and spices.
• Then it’s a day for distillation, and all of that goes into glass carboys, where it’s aged for a year, sometimes two.

“I’m a chemist,” Osborn says, “and as far as I can tell, absinthe just gets better and better aging in glass. I can’t understand why it’s so important from a nerd point of view, but our sense of taste is better than any scientific instrument.”

Passion and Pragmatism

From timing to still materials, many decisions come down not only to creativity, but also to practical limitations.

Osborn says that elements of his process are luxuries made possible because he and his wife, co-owner Kim Wagner, don’t employ a large full-time staff. Some distilleries may need to streamline their processes (and skip the years-long aging, for example) to get product out the door—and there are plenty of ways to ensure that the product is still delicious.

That craft aspect of absinthe today may be part of its fresh appeal. Even as demand grows and bars welcome more curious drinkers, absinthe is not going to be the primary money-maker for most distilleries. It remains a passion project—an opportunity to embrace tradition or discover new paths of experimentation—with plenty of room to perfect your process over time.