I’ve put up a few links on the Lanyrd page for my session – if anyone has any other pictures, notes or anything they don’t mind sharing please add them over there.

The two absinthes we tried were La Maison Fontaine Blanche and Jade Espirit Edouard, which are both rather lovely. I got mine from The Whisky Exchange, which you’d expect seeing as I work there. For more info on absinthe I recommend having a look at Oxygenee, Jade Liqueurs, Liqueurs de France and The Wormwood Society, as well as my other absinthe posts (of which there are more to come).

Ta muchly to those who came – be good, buy decent absinthe and don’t set fire to it.

Simply put, it’s a tweak to an old fashioned, using bright red Peychaud’s Bitters, rather than the traditional Angostura, and rye whiskey, all poured into an absinthe washed glass. These days the modern sazerac is rye stirred with ice, sugar (syrup or a cube depending on the stirrer) and Peychaud’s, in some way then joined with absinthe.

While some bartenders add a drop to the mix I prefer to drop back to the recipe I was originally told and coat the glass with absinthe, which doesn’t add much to the flavour of the spirit directly, but adds everything through smell – when you bring the glass to your mouth the sweet aniseed hits you in the face just before you sip the sweetened, spicy whiskey.

I recorded a short video showing how I make them. Please forgive my dirty kitchen…

Mine comes out reminding me of a sweet shop – hints of aniseed overlaid with candy sweetness and spiciness, along with the red colouring of the drink fooling the brain into expecting a boiled sweet flavour all add to the scent of childhood, with an extra brain punching slug of booze.

If you want to know how to do it properly, then have a look at this video. He pretty much agrees with me, but says it much better. His accent is much more authentic than my Sussex sourced tones as well.

It’s become, along with the ‘Wet, slightly dirty Martini’ one of my standard drinks to order in a bar. So far they’ve generally been what I’ve expected, with varying levels of similarity (for good or ill) to the ones I make at home. However the one I had at Maze was both entirely different and also quite nice, which I wouldn’t have expected from the ingredients – Johnny Walker Black Label, Pernod, Angostura Bitters and a sugar cube, all stirred up with some ice. It may be an old cocktail and one not much known these days, but there are still a bunch of variations on the theme, many of them listed in bar bibles as ‘The Original Sazerac’… I still like mine the most.

I’ve recently heard tales that the company that makes Angostura had gone out of business and as such there would be no more, however it seems that is not true. At least, that’s what the company are saying. According to The Guardian they had to shut down production for a spell due to issues with finances after the company changed hands. However, it seems that shipments have started up again and there may be Angostura appearing on these fair shores again soon.

However, I was over at Vinopolis last night for a whisky tasting and ended up talking to one of the guys at The Whisky Exchange about bitters. He advised me against the Peychaud’s I’d picked up, as he reckoned it wouldn’t go well with the Rittenhouse 100 I’d grabbed at the same time (initially assuming I was going to make Sazeracs [which Peychaud's is an ingredient of] and offering me a miniature of Absinthe to use as part of that recipe [experiments to follow when I do buy some absinthe], and then shocked that I might use it in whisky old fashioned. He let me buy some when I explained that I would probably use it in rum and brandy Old Fashioneds as well as just for general drink experimentation. I like the guys at The Whisky Exchange) and offered me Fee Brothers Old Fashioned as an alternative to Angostura, which he seemed to think were dead and gone. The Grauniad article is from last November and there is still a definite lack of Angostura on the shelves, so it may be more serious than was initially thought. The US is the main consumer (although at a measley 950k bottles you can see why most people have never bought more than one) and they seem to have supplies resuming, so hopefully the worst is over.

The bottle above has been in my possession for the last 10 years, having been left in my first post-university flat by a house guest, and despite many years of drinking bitters laden cocktails I am still barely half way through it. Long may it continue.

Update: While in Worcester this weekend for a birthday party I found a row of shiny new bottles of Angostura in Tesco. I’d like to think that this means that the shortage is now over rather than Tesco having a stash due to not selling much in Worcester. I still grabbed a bottle, just in case.