苦艾酒英語為Absinthe，它也是一個法語詞，是指一種酒精飲料也指一種苦艾的植物
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苦艾酒台灣稱為「艾碧斯」（俗稱大麻酒），是一種高濃度的蒸餾酒，具有茴芹味。苦艾酒使用的草藥包含一種叫「苦艾」的藥用植物的花與葉，這種植物的學名為中亞苦蒿（Artemisia absinthium）。苦艾酒有時會被錯認為是利口酒（一種加配香味或添加糖分），餐後飲用的蒸餾酒，而實際上它屬於原味的蒸餾酒，本身並不加糖，當然的確也存在甜味苦艾酒，但那是依據個人口味而自行添加的。
苦艾酒常被稱為「綠仙子」，因為它的顏色通常是暗綠色或祖母綠色，但也有透明的。品嚐苦艾酒時，人們通常會用3-5份的冰水配一份苦艾酒，不僅是因為苦艾酒擁有極高的酒精度數和濃度，而且這樣的品嚐方式會使人帶來一種朦朧的感覺。這樣的冰水還有一個作用，就是溶解添加的糖以減輕苦味。另外，還有一個很關鍵的步驟，甚至已經形成了一種儀式，就是最好使用一種開槽的苦艾酒匙或其它專用的用具來飲用。苦艾酒的味道有點像茴芹味的利口酒，略顯苦澀且由於加入了多種草藥而具有更複雜的味道。
苦艾酒起源於瑞士的萬能藥，後來在美國也作為一種類似的成藥而被使用。但是它的流行是在19世紀末和20世紀初的法國，特別是在巴黎的藝術家和作家中，至今他們還將這種酒跟浪漫聯繫在一起。在鼎盛時期，世界範圍內最著名的苦艾酒品牌是法國的Pernod Fils。可就在它最流行的時候，卻被認為是一種毒品，既存在危險的成癮又會對精神產生影響的藥物，其所含的化學物質苦艾腦（側柏酮）被指出含有毒副作用。到1915年為止，許多歐洲國家及美國對苦艾酒頒布了禁令。沒有證據表明苦艾酒比任何其它的普通酒精飲品具有毒性和精神作用，在它被誹謗了近80餘年之後，於20世紀90年代終獲新生，許多歐洲國家開始重新准許生產與銷售苦艾酒。
アブサン（仏：absinthe。アブサント、アプサンとも）は、フランス、スイス、チェコ、スペインを中心にヨーロッパ各国で作られている、薬草系リキュールの一つで、ニガヨモギ、アニス、ウイキョウ等を中心に複数のハーブ、スパイスが主成分である。
日本では、有名な商品名であるペルノー（仏：pernod）を一般名詞的に呼ぶ場合がある。ペルノーという呼び方は、同社のもう一つの有名な商品であるアニス酒を指す事もある。
誕生から禁止、解禁まで
元々はスイスのヴェルト・トラ・ヴェルで作られていたニガヨモギを原料とした薬を医師ピエール・オーディナーレが蒸留を応用し独自の処方を発案、彼はその製法を1797年にアンリ・ルイ・ペルノーに売却。ペルノーが商品化した。特に、19世紀フランスの芸術家達によって愛飲され、作品の題材とされた。
安価なアルコールだったために多数の中毒者・犯罪者を出した事でも知られる。アブサン中毒で身を滅ぼした有名人としては、詩人ヴェルレーヌや画家ロートレックが居る。
ニガヨモギの香味成分であるツヨンにより幻覚等の向精神作用が引き起こされるとされ（現在ではツヨンが原因によるアブサン中毒は疑問視されている）、19世紀初頭、フランス（1915年3月17日）を中心にスイス・ドイツ・アメリカなどでアブサンの製造・流通・販売は禁止された。この為ニガヨモギを用いないアブサンの代替品として、パスティス（フランス語の"se pastiser"似せる、を由来とする）が製造された。一方、スペインなど禁止されていない国もあった。
その後、1981年にWHOが、ツヨン残存許容量が10ppm以下（ビター系リキュールは35ppm以下）なら承認するとしたため、製造が復活。禁止国であったスイスでも2005年3月1日に正式に解禁された。製造が禁止されていた期間にも、販売を目的としない小規模な製造に付いては殆ど取り締まりがなかった為、フランス・スイス等を中心とする欧州の各地に自家用のアブサン醸造家が存在した。この期間においても日本ではニガヨモギ抽出物が食品添加物（既存添加物）として使用が許可されていた為、ペルノーが一般的な流通ルートで輸入されており、サントリーなどの国産品もあり、洋酒販売店やバーにおいてはそれほど珍しい酒ではなかった。
A Liquor of Legend Makes a Comeback
HERBAL Lance Winters makes absinthe at the St. George Spirits distillery in Alameda, Calif.
EARLIER this year, when Lance Winters heard that absinthe was being sold in the United States again for the first time since 1912, he shrugged it off. Then he reconsidered. He’d spent 11 years perfecting an absinthe at St. George Spirits, the distillery where he works in Alameda, Calif., and considered it one of the best things he’d ever made. Why not sell it?
The company’s Absinthe Verte will be in stores later this month.
Over the past few months, he must have wished he’d stuck to his first instinct.
The division of the Treasury Department that approves alcohol packaging sent back his label seven times, he said. They thought it looked too much like the British pound note. They wondered why it was called Absinthe Verte when their lab analysis said the liquid inside was amber. Mostly, it seemed to him, they didn’t like the monkey.
“I had the image of a spider monkey beating on a skull with femur bones,” Mr. Winters said. But he said that the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau thought the label “implied that there are hallucinogenic, mind-altering or psychotropic qualities” to the product.
“I said, ‘You get all that just from looking at a monkey?’”
His frustration came to a sudden end last Wednesday, when he learned the agency had finally granted approval to his St. George Absinthe Verte, the first American-made absinthe on the market in almost a century.
Since the start of the year, at least four absinthes, including two from Europe and one from South America, have been cleared for sale. At the same time, hundred-year-old legends about its ties to murder and madness have been discredited. For years, absinthe’s chief appeal has been its shady reputation and contraband status. It was said to have caused artists like Van Gogh to hallucinate. Now that it is safe and legal, will anyone still drink it?
To find out, I tried the two absinthes on sale in New York along with an early sample of St. George Absinthe Verte. And I was astonished by how delicate, gentle and refreshing they were. Astonished in part because of my earlier run-ins with absinthe. There was the Portuguese stuff that looked like radiator fluid and tasted like a mouthful of copper. There was the Czech product that a friend smuggled past customs in a mouthwash bottle. I would have preferred the mouthwash.
Another European brand is “the color of reactor cooling fluid and there’s nothing natural about that,” said Mr. Winters, who would know. Before turning to alcohol as a full-time job, he worked as an engineer on a reactor on board a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
Absinthe aficionados agree that a lot of absinthe isn’t very good.
“Before Hurricane Katrina destroyed a lot of my things, I had a very extensive collection of bad absinthe,” said T. A. Breaux, a former resident of New Orleans who designed one of the new absinthes, Lucid. Most of Mr. Breaux’s bad absinthe is modern, but the taste of absinthe has been problematic for centuries. The word comes from the Greek apsinthion, which means undrinkable. The essential ingredient in absinthe, a medicinal herb called grand wormwood, is profoundly bitter. How bitter?
“Ever take malaria pills?” Mr. Winters asked. “Ever bite into one?”
Mr. Winters had never tasted absinthe when he started making his own. Nor did he hope to sell it. He was just playing. “You know, give a boy a still,” he said. He worked from a recipe in a back issue of Scientific American, then adjusted the formula. “It was just a manic obsession with the ingredients that drove me to tweak the formula.”
After a few tries, Mr. Winters found that grand wormwood was best used in just the first step of absinthe making, when it is infused into grape brandy along with anise and fennel and then distilled, so its bitterness could be left behind in the still. In the second step, he infused a portion of what came out of the still with lemon balm, hyssop, tarragon and other botanicals, including a much less bitter cousin of grand wormwood. Finally this flavorful infusion is mixed back into the result of the first distillation.
Mr. Breaux, too, muffles the wormwood with fennel and anise. An environmental chemist with access to gas chromatography mass spectrometers, he had analyzed unopened samples of absinthe from before the ban.
“They are just beautiful pieces of craftsmanship,” he said. “They were artisanally made with the best herbs and there’s just no comparison between that and something that has green dye and ‘absinthe’ stamped on the bottle.” The two kinds have as much in common, he said, as “a good Bordeaux and a bottle of cheap wine that one buys in a roadside convenience store.”
That, more or less, is what I’d say about the difference between the absinthes I cut my teeth on and those produced by Mr. Breaux, Mr. Winters and the Kübler distillery in Switzerland.
I tried each straight (eye-opening, but not for everybody), and diluted with water. The sugar cube of legend is not needed with a skillfully made absinthe, which all of these were.
The Kübler Absinthe Supérieure ($56.99), at 53 percent alcohol, is the easiest to understand. Fans of Pernod and other absinthe substitutes will find the flavors familiar. But while Pernod speaks of anise, Kübler tastes like licorice. It says only one thing, but says it very pleasantly.
With Lucid ($67.99), things get more complicated. Mr. Breaux makes it in a French distillery based on his analysis of vintage absinthes. Besides a bracing dose of fresh anise and a back-of-the-tongue bitterness, on one tasting, I thought I detected asparagus. A second encounter was more minty. Both times, Lucid kept pulling me back in for a fourth, seventh, twelfth sip. It was alarmingly easy to imagine exploring it while a long afternoon slipped away.
St. George, which will cost around $75, is the most layered of the three. Mr. Winters has a history of capturing delicate aromas in a bottle (a vodka of his called Hangar One smells just like mandarin blossoms) and his Absinthe Verte is full of fresh green herbs. Anise and fennel make their scheduled appearance but hardly dominate.
While the United States may be in the throes of an absinthe renaissance, distillers suspect that new bottles will arrive slowly. Absinthe was banned in America in 1912 because of health concerns fanned by some of the same anti-alcohol forces who would later push through Prohibition. Due to a reorganization of the government’s food-safety bureaucracy, the ban was effectively lifted before World War II, although it took decades before anybody realized it.
One absinthe that will try to brave the regulators next year is a spirit distilled by Markus Lion in Germany for the performer Marilyn Manson. Called Mansinthe, it is “designed to please newbies as well as long-term absinthe lovers,” Mr. Lion said in an e-mail message.
Mr. Breaux has crafted several other absinthes that are sold in Europe, but he and his American importer, Viridian Spirits, are not ready to face the Tax and Trade Bureau again just yet.
“I’m trying to recover my sanity first,” said Mr. Breaux. “There’s this perception that we opened a door and now anybody can walk in. But it’s not like that. It’s like everything is still on probationary status.”
Jared Gurfein, who founded Viridian, agreed. “There’s no question they’re watching us,” he said. “I’m just not sure what they’re watching for. I hope it’s not for somebody to cut their ear off.”
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