You may have noticed that ABG was absent last Friday (or maybe not, how the hell should I know). However, I have a good excuse. I was working to get out the Mercury's Guide to Food and Entertaining. Maybe you've seen it. You know, it's the one with the cover that you can laminate and use as a placemat at your next party. Seriously. (You're welcome).

In said Guide, Lance Mayhew of the Oregon Bartenders Guild graciously agreed to provide readers with some awesome punch recipes. Why punch? Because its easy, allows the host to enjoy time with guests without playing bartender, and is often boozy as hell.

Well, I've got an exclusive bonus Mayhew punch recipe just for you drunky Blogtownies. Extra Bonus Action Plus: it involves sparkling wine (or champagne if you can get the real stuff). Classy!

Classic Champagne Punch
(yields slightly more than 1 quart)

1 quart champagne or sparkling wine
3 Tbs sugar
1 orange sliced
juice of 1 lemon
1/4 pineapple, cut in small pieces
3 oz raspberry or strawberry puree (syrup if you must)

Mix together in large punch bowl. Enjoy! Multiply this by 4 and you have a gallon of punch, probably enough for 15.

Yowza!

Moving on... Last weekend marked the roll-out of Marteau, the newest US absinthe made right here in Portland.

I had a chance to sit down with Gwydion Stone at House Spirits (where he's producing and bottling the green elixir) to talk about his gorgeous creation. Better yet, we had a couple glasses (each) of his Marteau (French for hammer-ha ha) and I gotta tell you, it's extraordinary. The flavor of is very light on anise but has a lovely floral hint of bergamot, with just a teensy bit of pepper. When prepared, the louche is absolutely gorgeous. It's not so much milky, as opaque. There are tones of yellows and blues, as well as light green. Opalescent is maybe the word. If I had $80 to spend on a bottle of absinthe, this would be my drink. Now you know what you can get me for my birthday...

What follows is our conversation in full. At least, until I stopped asking questions and began gazing into my glass of Marteau, musing about my past...

ABG: What is Your Relationship with House Spirits?

Gwydion Stone: Actually they are letting me work on my absinthe here. It's a team effort, it's not a one man job. Basically I came to them and I said look, can I play at your house? I had met them several years back at one of the Wormwood Society events and when I realized I was going to get a chance to make absinthe in the United States, I was like, hey, I remember those guys, and that was it.

So, are you from the area?

I'm originally from Cincinnati but I've been in Seattle for 20 years. But once the dust settles from the launch my wife and I are going to relocate and come down here.

How did this come about?

To start at the very beginning, the first time I heard about absinthe, I was six or seven, I heard about it from my grandmother. I asked her about the color chartreuse, why does this one color have such an odd name, and she said it was named after this liqueur that was green, and she mentioned there was this other liqueur that was green called absinthe, but they don't sell it anymore because it was poisoning people.

And that just piqued my imagination, there was liqueur, and they were selling it, and it was poisoning people! She wasn't an absinthe drinker but she grew up in a year when it was a lot closer, she was born a year before the ban here.

So fast-forward to the seventies and I became very interested in herbalism and alternative medicine and alchemy, and I started making my own liqueurs, maceration, infusions, and that made me remember absinthe. So I looked it up in the encyclopedia (there was no on-line) and I found out how you made it, what went into it, and how it was distilled, and I said, "Well I can't distill it so I'll just leave that part out." So I macerated it all up and of course it tasted like hell. Just nasty. Have you ever tasted raw wormwood? Homemade absinthe? It's just dreadful. It's the second most bitter herb next to rue, and it's just unbelievable. You have to experience it. But I don't recommend you do it anytime you're going to drink anything else, because it will ruin your pallet.

So that was my second absinthe experience, no wonder it made people crazy, drinking this crap! And it wasn't until 20 years later that I realized it really wasn't that bitter, that once it was distilled, all that bitterness went away. And I guess in the mid 90s it got my interest again because it was a hit in the media--Bram Stoker's Dracula has a big absinthe scene it--and that reminded me, "Oh yeah! But now we have internet and we can really look stuff up."

Information was sparse back in those days. It wasn't until the turn of the century really that things started picking up. In 2003 I finally managed to buy some absinthe off someone from Europe and I really loved it. I've always loved anise, but this was different. So I became an instant absinthe fan and I found some other locals in Seattle who were too, and I thought, "Since this stuff is really expensive to import, wouldn't it be cool if a bunch of us got together to do a big order? Then we could save a lot of money on shipping. And then we could have absinthe parties and taste all the different kinds." That was the birth of the Wormwood Society.

It was totally a living room group of friends. We were using Livejournal to communicate, and that turned out not to be very efficient so I started a discussion forum, and as soon as word got out to the larger absinthe community, folks all over the world wanted to join, and after about a year we opened it to an international audience, and it just exploded, we went from 100 to 1500 members.

How many absinthe's have you Tasted?

I stopped counting at 125. It's been quite a few. I'd guess somewhere in the neighborhood of 200. Some of those would be multiple distillations of a similar brand. And a lot of those were also very small batches, not commercial.

And no madness to speak of?

No, thousands of glasses of absinthe, thousands, and no. Still have my ears. No more memory loss than you would expect of someone who is 51. That's what my wife is for.

What sets Marteau apart from other American-produced absinthes?

It's kind of hard to say without sounding like marketing fluff. But it's really the most authentic absinthe being made in America. It's right up there with the most authentic of any of the absinthes being made in the world. There's maybe two or three other brands that are full on "This is a Belle Epoch absinthe." I strictly followed 19th century protocols and recipes.

It seems customary for [artesianal producers] to put their own spin on it. And I think you can do that without stepping outside of the traditional realm. And a number of the other products have played around, maybe using all local materials. And I think that's good. It's good for the category... At least cautious innovation. But I wanted my first offering to be 100 percent by the book, authentic. A lot of the criticisms of the early absinthes that showed up here was that they had to tweak this or that to make it compliant; they had to lower the wormwood content, whatever. And I was just absolutely determined not to do that. I am determined that you can make it the way it's supposed to be made, by the book, and have it be compliant. I could add a lot more wormwood to this, but it would screw up the flavor. It's well under the range.

You're using a Belle Epoch recipe?

They are based on Belle Epoch recipes. It's my own proprietary formula, but it's based on Belle Epoch ingredients and similar ones that you would find in historic absinthe. This would have been a prohibitory absinthe that you would have found back in the day. This would have been just another brand. But it's right up there with the most authentic. The coloring is absolutely 100 percent natural, infused with botanicals, hand colored.

But you aren't using an "authentic" Belle Epoch still... does that affect you claim of authenticity?

The apparatus has some effect on the given character of a spirit, but it's still absinthe. But our stills are similar. And stills evolved over there over the years, too. And not everyone is going to like it. It can be an acquired taste. And that's why I'm not going to make it so more people will like it. I'm going to make true absinthe. This is the way it should be, it should have the characteristic of a moonstone. It's one of the hallmarks of a really well made absinthe. It's really beautiful to look at.

Is the wormwood society looking forward to this?

Yes, some of them are. Some of them have tasted some test batches. There are regional styles of absinthe, or there were, named after the areas of France where they were from, and some are very much the wormwood up front, and some have less and it's more anise, or some have more coriander, or in this case, angelica root, the really woody, earthy note you're picking up there.

[At this point I begin sipping the Marteau] It's definitely unique to any of the absinthe's I have tried. It's incredibly balanced. Wow. It's almost as if there are some bergemont kind of flavors. It's just lovely. Wow, it's just very nice.

There's quite a bit of anise in [Integrity Spirits] Trillium , which some people's pallet's interpret as a sweetness. The balance is probably the most important thing about getting absinthe right.

In terms of how you'd like people to enjoy it, are you thinking straight with a spoon and sugar cube and ice water or do you thinking cocktails as well?

Both. Absolutely. Not everybody is going to like absinthe straight up or with water. For those who don't care for anise flavor at all, there are cocktails where you can use a substantial amount of absinthe, and it works as a catalyst to tie everything together instead of being anise in your face.

I'm finding it goes surprisingly well with rums and with tropical fruits, especially pineapple. It was kind of shocking for me, because I never thought of absinthe in a tiki drink context. Sazerac is my favorite cocktail, it's always my first cocktail if I go somewhere. So if I didn't make an absinthe that worked in a sazerac, i'd feel bad. It's kind of the benchmark of cocktails

When you say original or authentic my mind jumps to "bitter."

That's a myth. What everybody believes about absinthe right now has come about in the last 10 or 12 years, not just the drug thing, that's new, but the bitterness idea comes from people like me in the 70s trying to make absinthe - oh that was bitter! And people don't want to taste it because it's so bitter, but distillation gets rid of it. I've tasted 100 year old absinthes, and they taste like [Marteau]. It's an afternoon drink, for a summer day, sitting out on the veranda, whatever, or a sidewalk cafÈ with your friends, a nice cool one, it's not a party drink. No shooters, only idiots did that. This is mild compared to some, at aside from the fact that it's so strong, it's foolish [to shoot absinthe]. It's basically a trick for if you want to get hammered. And the flavors don't open up and come available to your pallet until they've been diluted with water. So all you get is the burn.

To bring this back around full circle to your question about cocktails or traditional preparation, I think both are really important. Traditional preparation is good to be able to offer, particularly for bars, so people can know how it should be done. But at the same time, while that was the popular way to drink it in France, in America, it was hugely a cocktail tradition. In the Savoy and Waldorf, there were hundreds of cocktail recipes calling for absinthe. Dashes and splashes. That was one of the things that got me really excited, when Robert Hess started interfacing with the cocktail community. There were very few cocktailians around when I got involved who knew much about absinthe. And at the same time in the absinthe scene, most people were like, "Ugh, cocktails. I only want to drink absinthe, and the only thing proper to mix it with is water."

But I had a long list of other things that mix really well with absinthe. And there were people in the absinthe community that were like, "What can you mix with it? What can go well with it? Well, let's start with whiskey." Especially I want to address how traditional it is to use absinthe in cocktails. And there are some absinthes that are popping up that don't taste anything like absinthe, and they are claiming they've developed this flavor so that it's more mixable, but it's already great in cocktails. I'm not going to change my absinthe so some bartender doesn't have to learn how to use it.