The surprising alcoholic drink making a big comeback in UK

Vincent Van Gogh was rather fond of absinthe. Like many of the artists of his period, a little too fond, perhaps. It was after drinking the concentrated spirit, in the south of France around Christmas 1888, that he famously cut off his ear.

While the jury is out over whether absinthe affected his decision to self-mutilate, one thing is for sure: this distillation of grand wormwood, anise, fennel and other herbs, is one of the most alcoholic spirits you’ll find in any drinks cabinet – sometimes as much as 74% proof. And if a new report is to be believed, its popularity as a modern-day party drink is growing.

According to the Business Research Company, global consumption of the green fairy – as it is known thanks to its distinctive colour – is currently worth £29billion and expected to rise to a massive £32billion by 2028.

The anise-flavoured spirit is also experiencing a UK renaissance, where bars and distilleries are reporting 40 to 50% year-on-year sales growth and a growing number of high-end cocktail bars where mixologists include absinthe as a key ingredient. Back in the Belle Epoque era, around the late 1800s, consumption of absinthe in France and Switzerland was widespread.

In certain sectors of society it was more prevalent than wine, just as cheap gin had enjoyed mass appeal in Britain in the early 1700s. Part of absinthe’s appeal was thanks to the French army which supplied the drink to its troops based in Algeria and Indo-China to ward off malaria and dysentery.

Returning home, soldiers found they’d developed a taste for the stuff and started ordering it in bars. Civilians followed suit and absinthe quickly became so fashionable that, by the 1860s, happy hour was called “l’heure verte” (“the green hour”).

At the turn of the century the French were guzzling 36 million litres a year, particularly among the working classes where (often adulterated) versions of the drink were cheaper than wine.

It was also popular with the bourgeoisie whose wine supplies had been decimated by the phylloxera bug, and, most infamously, with bohemian creatives. As well as Van Gogh, artists Edouard Manet and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and writers Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Guy de Maupassant, Charles Baudelaire and Emile Zola were all knocking back the stuff.

Toulouse-Lautrec loved it so much that, as well as depicting it in several of his paintings, he invented a cocktail called The Earthquake, which included equal parts absinthe and Cognac, shaken with ice.

In later life his alcoholism was so extreme that he kept glass vials of absinthe in the top of his walking cane. Things came to a head, though, in 1905 when Swiss-French labourer Jean Lanfray shot and killed his pregnant wife and two baby daughters in a drunken rage after knocking back some absinthes. He then tried to shoot himself.

The Swiss authorities, who already considered this drink the cause of all society’s ills, banned it. Believed to trigger everything from genius to madness, its supposed hallucinogenic effects fuelled moral outrage.

A chemical in absinthe called thujone has been shown, in very large amounts, to cause seizures and hallucinations. Although the quantities have since been shown to be too small, the fearsome reputation of thujone led various governments to prohibit absinthe outright.

Winemakers, jealous of the spirit’s enormous success, fuelled hysteria by exaggerating stories of its hallucinatory effects. By the outbreak of the First World War, the green fairy had been banned in Switzerland, France, Belgium, Netherlands, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the United States.

In some countries this prohibition lasted until around a century later. But it was still a cultural phenomenon, with Kylie making a cameo as a hallucinatory Green Fairy when Ewan McGregor’s poet and pals knock back the spirit in the film musical Moulin Rouge! in 2001.

Modern British drinks importer George Rowley helped with overturning the French ban in 2011 and he now distills a range of absinthes in France called La Fée – French for “the Fairy”.

He claims his is the best-selling absinthe brand in the UK. There’s been a rise in demand, he says, since the Covid lockdowns, when people stuck at home stocked up their drinks cabinets with less orthodox spirits so they could mix more adventurous cocktails.

“People are naturally curious,” he adds. “They want a spirit collection to wow their friends with, and to make exciting home cocktails. This is likely fuelled by social media platforms. Add to this the expense of going out and you see people drinking at home more. If they’re going to buy spirits, they’d prefer to buy less, but buy well.”

Rowley, 60, first imported absinthe to the UK in the late 1990s, distilling it in the Czech Republic because of the strict French ban at the time. Before his first shipment had arrived, TV presenter Jeremy Paxman asked him to mix up a cocktail for on the BBC’s Newsnight programme.

The method Rowley demonstrated on TV was nothing like the cocktail-making of the Belle Epoque period. Instead, he displayed a far more dramatic and modern Czech routine which involved pouring the absinthe on to a sugar cube and setting it alight.

This “sugar-and-burn” method also came to the attention of Hollywood actor Johnny Depp who was in the UK filming his 1999 horror movie Sleepy Hollow. When Depp requested some absinthe, Rowley obliged, quickly getting a few bottles from Eastern Europe.

“We hadn’t got any in the UK and Johnny Depp wanted a bloody bottle,” he recalls. “What do you do?”

When Depp’s driver turned up at Rowley’s house in Hertfordshire to pick up the elusive drink, he asked him why such urgency.

“He told me Mr Depp was on a private jet the next day, flying back to the US,” Rowley explains. It turns out Depp wanted to share the absinthe with hard-drinking American journalist Hunter S Thompson, with whom he had worked on his comedy film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

“In effect, Mr Depp became our first client,” Rowley recalls. Nowadays, he discourages this sugar-and-burn routine and favours classic absinthe cocktails instead.

“We don’t want anyone to burn themselves,” he says. “But it’s true that the excitement of sugar-and-burn was what put absinthe on the map. It was crazy.”

Another British company riding the new wave of absinthe drinking is Devil’s Botany, a craft distiller based in East London which launched in 2020 and claims to be “the only dedicated absinthe distillery in the UK”.

Run by husband-and-wife team Rhys Everett and Allison Crawbuck, their absinthes range in strength from 24% to 63% – much weaker than the traditional spirit. The couple also have an absinthe bar in London’s East End called the Absinthe Parlour.

They believe their spirit’s popularity is partly down to interest in artisanal drinks and a natural progression from the craft gin boom of the 2010s. Like Rowley, they also point to the Covid effect.

“During the Covid lockdowns you had consumers becoming home bar tenders and everybody got very interested in classic cocktail recipes,” explains 36-year-old Crawbuck. “That unearthed an interest in more niche spirits like absinthe.”

Everett, also 36, says the younger Generation Z has developed an appetite for the green fairy. “There is definitely this Gen Z push we’ve seen from new bars opening across America,” he adds. “The younger generation are not drinking just to get drunk. They’re drinking cocktails to have an experience, to socialise and to savour it.”

And what about the infamous hallucinatory effects of absinthe? Everett isn’t so sure. “If you consider the ingredients – the anise, the fennel seed and the grand wormwood – they give you a heightened sense of invigoration, I suppose.

“It’s not that you’re going to drink it and hallucinate. But you might feel good and there are certain botanicals that react with you that elevate your being. As you drink it, you maybe feel clearer and more creative.”

Everett says the levels of thujone permitted in any absinthe are a tiny 35 parts per million. “To have any effect of the thujone from drinking absinthe is impossible,” he stresses. “You’d sooner die of the alcohol poisoning than of thujone poisoning.”

So did absinthe really play any part in Van Gogh’s grisly self-mutilation? Everett and Crawbuck think not. They suggest he was so troubled that, green fairy or not, he would have sliced off his ear anyway.