Some of the people all of the time

The Kaiser called me last Saturday. He’d been out with his lady on Friday night, and they’d gone to some new trendy bar. The reason he was calling, he told me, was that he’d been drinking absinthe there . He swore it was absinthe. Lucid, he told me, was the brand. I had a hard time believing him, as I happen to know that the absinthe importation ban is still in effect. I went to their website, and it looked like the real deal. For a moment, I got a little excited. But just as things too good to be true tend to be, this was. It turns out that in October of 2007, the Department of the Treasury’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau revised its policy regarding the use of the term “absinthe” on labels of distilled spirits products and in related advertising material:

We approve the use of the term “absinthe” on the label of a distilled spirits product and in related advertisements only if the product is “thujone-free” pursuant to the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) regulation at 21 CFR 172.510. Based upon the level of detection of FDA's prescribed method for testing for the presence of thujone, TTB considers a product to be “thujone-free” if it contains less than 10 parts per million of thujone.

In other words, Lucid can be legally sold in the States since it contains less than 10 ppm of the stuff that makes absinthe a good time. It’s as if the government clarified the definition of “marijuana” to allow the sale of THC-free products, and I marketed non-filtered Lucky Strikes under the name “420,” and claimed they were cannabis because each cigarette contained a hemp seed. What a gyp. Pernod has been around forever, and tastes exactly as a good absinthe should. To hell with Lucid.

Incidentally, Samantha went on a vacation to Prague with her brother and his wife last month. She was able to smuggle me back a bottle of Czech absinthe. I’ve mentioned before that Czech absinthe tastes horrible. I can only liken it to drinking Windex, but it definitely has the thujone kick. I’ve always preferred Spanish absinthe, but when you’re looking to get drunk, Old Milwaukee is better than water, right? I’d run out of absinthe during my first Ubermom rendezvous, so now my supply is restocked.