I Made A 1800's French Absinthe To See If I Trip Balls

this is a historically accurate 1800's French absence AKA a belly poock absence in this video I'm going to show you exactly how I made it give you some juicy historic tidbits and at the end I'm going to uh drink a whole bunch of it to CFI trip balls how's it going Chasers I hope you're having a kickass week I'm Jesse this is still it and we need to set the stage for this historic absence it's the early mid late hundreds and French soldiers are returning from their campaigns in Africa and lo and behold they've developed a taste for absence and it doesn't take long for the popularity of absence to spread over to spill over to the general population in fact it starts to become a trendy drink in French C Culture by the way I got most of the information for this video the history the recipe for this wonderful drink from a guy named Alan Bishop if you want more detail on the recipe or the history I suggest you check out the podcast we recorded together there'll be links in the description down below for that currently Allan is the head distiller at a new distillery called Old Homestead Distillery watch the space Al's going to be releasing a whole bunch of really cool products coming out of Old Homestead Distillery so you know keep keep an eye out but right now to make an absin we need a neutral-ish spirit let's start out with 6 kg of beetro the real stuff guys the actual vegetable don't get out of a can that's a bad idea top them tail them dice them into 2 3 cm little cubes pop all of the beetro onto baking sheets giving a little bit of room around each piece so it can do its thing in the oven no oil no salt none of that and into an oven at 180° C for 30 to 40 minutes we're looking for a little bit of color but not burning or really getting dark is what I'm aiming for here pull those out and we can get on to the sugar wash so I've got about 25 L of water heating up in one of my other pots I'm actually just going to throw all of the beetroot into that just to really make sure it's kind of cooked through start to break it down a little bit get the goodness that we want from the beetroot out of the beetroot and into the liquid we can put all of that into the fermenter and mix in 12 kg of sugar that's this in Freedom Units all of these details the whole recipe will be down on the recipe below by the way team make sure all of the sugar is dissolved and HP up to 70 L with cold water checking that our temperatures are about right if it's looking like it's going to be too cold add some more hot water if it's looking like it's going to be too hot keep using cold water I'm aiming for about 33° C today because I will be using uh angel Ang Red Label yeast and I'm going to heat it up a little bit after I pitch the yeast I also have grave suspicions that the beetroot isn't going to give the yeast everything we need in terms of nutrients so I'm going to put uh three tpoon of a wine nutrient this is actually in as well honestly I've kind of got to the point where I don't stress too much about the specific yeast nutrient I'm using as long as it's actually a yeast nutrient I just roll with whatever I have on hand double check the temperature give it a really good blitzing uh to get some oxygen into solution for our yeast and Pitch our yeast this one took 4 days to ferment out it is time for distillation okay hold up uh isn't this a French absence and if so wouldn't the Bas Spirit be made with grapes and the answer to that is Yes actually the French did start making absence with grape based spirits but around about the 1860s foxer started showing up in Europe and specifically in France this is foxer It's a small like tiny little insects that sucks the sap out of grape roots and leaves and by the mid 1860s felox had brought the wine industry in France to its knees there was no more grapes so absin distillers turn to sugar beats I'm going to take roughly half of the wash out of the fermenta pop it into the still and distill it as a stripping run now I know that I'm going to want three plates on my still for the next run I'm lazy I can't be bother taking those out so I'm just going to run the stripping run with the plates in there I'm not going to put any uh coolant through the def flag though once the stripping run was finished I emptied all of the stuff left in the still out put the low Wines in the rest of the wash in and get up for the distillation run I'm leaving the still set up exactly the same way I'm using three plates uh the sight glass on the bottom is purely there as a puke detector and this time of course I'm going to be running coolant through the defle so you may be wondering why I'm using beetroot and sugar and to be honest this is kind of the least historically accurate part of the entire video but I'm using beetro to add a subtle earthy flavor to impersonate a spirit made with sugar beet if you want to of course you can just use sugar beat refined sugar but I wonder I think that perhaps doing so may create a spirit that's a little bit cleaner in flavor than what they were making from sugar beets back in the 1800s so I ran it at full reflux for about 5 10 minutes just to get everything sort of fractionated out in the column slowly reduce the amount of water going into the def Flags to collect four shots rolled over into collecting heads found my heart's cut kept on collecting for some time and once I hit tails the Run was done so let's double check our ABV and uh see if my mental math SL gut feeling got us anywhere near 85% ABV so the spirit I made came out at about 83% there is a subtle interesting earthy element coming from the beach root and interestingly kind of a a sweet almost Berry like Flavor as well now Alan specifically said that we want to hit 85% ABV I'm a little bit shy of that but totally in the ballpark and the reason we don't distill to a higher ABV and then proof it down is one they couldn't really do that back in the 1800s easily uh and two it's going to give a little bit more life to the spirit a little bit more flavor some of the flavor from the ingredients coming through of course if you don't want to go through the process of making this you can just use store bought vodo or ever CLE it's not going to make a huge difference to the final product not going to lie team I am quite excited about this let's get stuck in and the first step is of course the beat vodka that we've made uh I'm not quite sure what size batch I'm going to make yet uh that is 1 liter uh but if I learned anything from the first and only other absent I've ever made is I should have made more of it it was absolutely delicious and it disappeared really freaking quickly so you know what let's just uh use all of this and I'll scale the recipe the Botanical to the amount of vog we have we have 1.8 L I'll put the recipe I'm actually making all the volumes down in the description um I'll also round it to what's easier it's probably easier if I round it to one lit the the rispe and then you can scale it up or down as you need let's weigh out the tangles absin never ceases to uh blow my mind with the amount of stuff that we're going to put into the still but let's get started with the thing that makes absent absent wormwood and I have 48 G of the stuff which is going to go straight on in there the next uh ingredient that kind of defines this recipe specifically or you know this recipe is forward in Ace I'm going to give this a just a real light I wouldn't even say a crushing I'm just kind of going to rough it up a little bit this uh is going to take a while because I have 160 G of knes to get into this [Music] pot 142 G of fennel once again we're going to give this uh a little bit of a pounding just kind of crack the seeds to give access to the alcohol six G of peppermint 3 G of licorice root and now we're into the optional kind of additives the little flare kind of ingredients that ook go into this so we're going in with uh 16 G of [Music] coriander once again I don't need to pulverize this I do just kind of want to crack the seeds open a little bit and last and actually probably kind of least 1 G of lemon peel at the point it's worth noting that because this belly Pock absent is kind of a absent of the people its pop culture absent it's for the masses the flavor profiles changed a little it's become less bitter less worm Woody more an forward kind of dty full bodied a little bit sweeter a little bit more approachable and that reflects in the Botanical choices now if you're interested in the opposite of that I recorded a video in a podcast a while ago showing off a 1700's absent recipe links down there now we need to do the step no for absent as digestion which is just mation basically uh and to do this we're going to bring it up to 140° F which is right around 60° C uh because I trust this pot to not Scorch the Botanical I've put all the Botanical in and now I'm bringing it up to temperature I'll give it a little stew every now and again just to make sure everything's fine if you don't have a pot like this that you trust not to Scorch heat the alcohol first and then add the Botanical into it kill the heat mate that way uh and unfortunately sorry guys you're going to have to distill off Botanical I'm just going to distill in here when it comes time don't walk away from this uh because we're riding that line at 60° C uh we don't want this to actually start boiling and you know lose all the vapor into the atmosphere uh I shall nurse this get it up to 60° C pull the plug out so I know damn sure it's off pop the lid on and let it sit [Music] overnight so now we find France with very little wine to go around but a whole buttload of absin absin pretty much takes over as the trendy drink in France and it starts to get almost most romanticized with artistic type people especially declaring their love for it but hope is on the horizon for the wine industry with America ironically enough being the place where fxa likely came from potentially being their salvation this has been madting for 24 hours I've got the still turned on it's just starting to warm up uh but because I always freaking forget to show it and talk about it yes let's proof this down to uh below 40% ABV uh this uh the other good thing about that is it's going to thin it down a little bit uh give the Botanicals a little bit more room to move around in there and not Scorch to the bottom really not worried about that with the still but you know a little bit of extra safety especially when we're using this much Botanical is always welcome all right we're up and running I'll come back to you with first drips all right team we're up and running we got first drips the shed is smelling absolutely delicious I'm going to take just a little teeny tin tiny bit off the top maybe 15 20 Ms gets a little bit weird up front sometimes like concentrations of uh Botanicals can be odd but we switched over now uh don't have to worry about Cuts cuz we already did all the cuts on the Vodka wow that's pretty intense uh so long story short team we're going to collect down to around about 60% ABV we're going to do something a little bit different with the quote unquote Tails we'll talk about that when we get to it uh but for now we're just going to settle in and let this run uh I'm going to taste on the way down cuz I'm assuming there's going to be vast changes uh in flavor throughout the run right now it's got a interesting almost fruity characteristic to it actually uh but solidly anise very solidly anise not a lot of anything else that'll change throughout the r it turns out the best course of action to combat fuer was to import a fer resistant root stock from America and then graph the other varietals onto it and history will show that this was very effective but the problem is it takes a long time to essentially regrow a Vineyard and all the while absin is running away with win's Market [Music] here all right team so we're uh this far in now uh and the flavor has changed significantly we've gone from pretty much straight and to a much more like herbal maybe a little bit of the coriander coming through slight slightly citrusy maybe some of that lemon but I think the worm would FL flavor is really starting to show up now uh and the finel is starting to fight the an off which is pretty interesting so now it's actually starting to taste like it doesn't just taste like uzo anymore which is pretty cool uh so I'm uh cautiously optimistic that we are on exactly the right track time to fast forward in history a little bit and now the wine industry in France has recovered they're restocking the pipeline they have product to sell but the problem is people have decided they really like this stuff absin is super popular whoops uh and apparently it's pretty hard to sell wine to people that are in love with absinth but that's nothing a good old-fashioned smear campaign can't fix all right we're still trucking along here uh let me switch this out and I think what I'm going to do is just put it all back into this container for now cuz we're going to be splitting this up uh doing another mation and so on and so forth get it into this container with a lid on but right now what are we tasting seems like we've kind of gone past uh that slightly citrusy what I think was the coriander showing up I don't think I'd really pick up that small amount of lemon with all these other Botanical getting a little bit more on the Herby Savory side of things I haven't found a whole of peppermint anywhere which is interesting Licor sh starting to get a little bit of Licor sh okay cool time to jump in and say a huge thank you to the chase thecraft patreons thank you so much for supporting us day in month out we can't say thank you enough you're the reason we get to make videos like this so thank you so much Tim if you're enjoying these videos and you find Value in them you can go to Chase thecraft tocom to pick up some supplies for the hobby uh or sign up to the newsletter which will give you behind the scenes little action titbits and you'll be one of the first people to know when we have something new and cool in the pipeline back to the video all right team we are slightly under 60% ABV it's still not tasting terrible uh but this is where Alan suggested I make the cut and I think I can kind of tell why it's going from tasting um botanically to being slightly more grassy and it's not necessarily bad but I can see why you wouldn't necessarily want this in the final product uh so I'm going to make the cut here and not keep anymore for this but in the tradition of absin we're not going to be throwing any of this out so we're going to keep collecting for now uh until the spirit starts going cloudy so what I'm going to do is get this out of the way get a small cup in uh and just collect small amounts here and tip it over over into this glass and then as I collect a little bit I'll tip it over into the glass jar uh because the higher ABV Spirit that's already in the jar may help to kind of dissolve some of the uh coners some of the essential oils some of the flavors coming over from the Botanicals and kind of hide the fact that it's getting cloudy I don't know if this is the proper way to do it but it's the way I want to do it to kind of check for myself when it starts going cloudy we're going to make another cut and we're going to collect the Cloudy stuff separately so the wine industry goes after absence and they go hard they focus on the alpha fugen coming from the wormwood and declare that it creates hallucinations and incites Madness to really stir the part they find absolutely any story that they can relate to absin that has a bad ending and blame it all on absence Alan Bishop gave a interesting example of a guy that went on a multiple day Bender drinking everything he could get his hands on and he had a couple of glasses of absin turns out after that he murdered his entire family obviously the absence made him do it keep the still running and what we have here is the quote unquote Hearts from the Run what we're actually going to be drinking as absent this time around uh we have the spirit that came off clear under 60% until it started to go turkey this is going to go back into our next rectification of Base alcohol so yes it tastes absy but if you're making absent it doesn't matter right we're going to put it back in we may as well reclaim the good alcohol that's in here to use for next time as we're making the base alcohol this the Milky stuff looks kind of crazy and you may be uh tempted to discard it in fact this is kind of gold in absent terms it's called blanquet and we would put this back into our next Spirit Run so the next time we make absence this goes back into the pot with the Botanical before distillation and it is absolutely cram packed full of flavor and even right now to be honest it doesn't taste bad there's nothing really wrong with it it's getting a little bit astringent it's almost getting oily too I can see like little droplets of oil forming on top there's a lot of body there's a lot of flavor in this we may as well recycle it next time we make absin it turns out the smear campaign against absin works very very well and in 1915 absinth is banned outlawed in France in fact it's banned in a whole host of countries all over the world including America but don't worry that is not the end of absence history in fact it's far from it but that is a a topic for a follow-up video in the future the last thing we need to do to finish off this absent is to do one last pass of a little bit of flavor and to color it up and to do that I have emptied the still out rinsed it out uh and once again I'm very impressed with this little chappie because we pretty much boiled those Botanical dry and nothing scorched on the bottom so awesome anyway it's been emptied out cleaned out and we're going to put half of our parts that we're keeping from the absin back in here so for me that is uh 700 M the reason we're using the still is because we need to warm it up for this mation again we get the uh the power on and once again we're aiming for 140° f or 60° C all right so we're hitting 56° C I'm going to kill it now because with a small amount of liquid in the pot we're going to get some overheat you know just coming up through the pot now we need to add some more Botanical in first up 4.8 G of petite wormwood 2.4 G of hsip and 3.3 G of lemon B just going to give it a little stir up to make sure nothing's clumping together and not actually getting moist pop the lid on and we're going to let this mercate the prescribed time is around about an hour according to Ellen uh I'll probably come in and check in on this in 20 minutes just to make sure things aren't getting too garly and uh we'll make a call on it somewhere between 20 minutes and an hour all right team uh what do you know it's been an hour and this is tasting really good uh I'd like it'd be nice to get a little bit more color on it I don't think the color is getting any deeper or darker uh and the flavor is right around where I was Hing it would be so I'm going to call it here um if the color is not as dark as it could be then you know what it is what it is so we're going to get all of this out of the steel and we are going to strain it nice little dgs can go in there and now this can get mixed back in with the rest of the absence you know what actually that color is uh better than I thought it was going to [Music] be that smells delicious all right I'm going to proof this down to I've decided to go with 62% ABV today uh we're going to let it sit for a couple of days to kind of chill out mellow pull all the flavors back together and then we can taste it so I've made the absin you know how to make it now too and it's it's delicious I got to say I'll going to be tasting notes in a minute but I think now is a good time to reflect on the fact that that smear campaign back in the late 1800s was so effective that the myths the Legends the hype about this drink still exist today and there's a bunch of people that will tell you that if it's real absin made with real wormwood it's going to make you trip balls I guess there's only one way to find out this is made with a pretty decent amount of real wormwood so I guess I need to drink a bunch of it and see if I trip walls traditionally absent is drunk watered down so for this little test I'm going to be doing 30 mil servs of absin uh and then proofing it down until it hits around about 14 15% ABV and you're going to notice it Go milky this is called Lucian and it is 100% desirable honestly I kind of wish this loosed a little bit harder and the next time I make it adding in that blanket uh I think it'll do an even better job but here's how I'm going to go about the super scientific test to see if I trip balls uh Allan suggested that maybe around the four drink sort of Mark is where you're going to feel the best effects from absin as opposed to a standard alcohol so I'm going to do just that loose it down drink it uh and while I'm drinking I'm actually going to play some crocodile drills if you don't know crocon don't worry uh the reason I'm doing it for this is it's kind of like a a skill game similar to something like pool or darts and I figure that if I'm doing something like that something that I know how I should perform I can kind of track how I'm feeling while I'm drinking after dosing myself with four drinks I noticed something very very interesting up here like mentally the way I perceive the world around me the way I see the world around me my thought processes felt like I was utterly smashed like I thought was going to walk into the bathroom and start talking to myself in the mirror for 5 minutes before I came back out and that's a really good indicator to me that I've had a little bit too much to drink but interestingly my motor skills felt almost untouched I felt completely sober and completely and utterly ripped at the same time which was very very bizarre and this is exactly the uh effects that Alan I think he described it as Lucid intoxication and I can completely understand that anyway I carried on playing crocodile I carried on drinking and by the time I got to six those two things had kind of come back together I just felt intoxicated uh and I was starting to act intoxicated as well no unfortunately I didn't trip balls I didn't see any theories uh I didn't murder my family I didn't have any hallucinations uh and that is kind of in line with what the scientific literature says about Alpha thujone it's not really uh going to make you hallucinate but there is kind of something to it man that sort of three through five standard drinks I don't know if I've ever felt like that it was a really different Buzz so on one hand mythbusted no I didn't trip balls on absin uh but I did get a really interesting different buzz and I can see why that specific type of Buzz would be very alluring for those that are into the artistic Pursuit so I can totally understand that having a completely altered mind state but being you know your motor skills are perfect for brush Strokes or whatever it happens to be on the other hand there was a lot of shady ass people making shady ass products back in the day uh to the point where uh Ellen was telling me about people literally coloring absence products with copper salts to get an interesting Hue sketchy as tell and of course I'm sure there had to be uh instances where people dosed it with magic mushrooms for example opium I don't know uh and I'm sure there were specific drinks out there that did make you trip balls That's Not absent it's not real absent in my opinion and I would say historically there's an argument uh to say that I'm right so after all the test thing I've still got a bottle and a half uh just put into Old reused bottles here uh and quick note to say that unfortunately this is just a natural color uh and it will fade from being kind of a bright green to more of a yellowy brown uh if that offends you go ahead and put food coloring in there if you want that seems wrong to me especially in a product like this so I'm totally cool with a yellowy brown kind of color instead of a vibrant green color just that if you are drinking a commercial absin and it looks like toxic ooze it's been colored it's been [ __ ] with anyway uh in terms of flavor and Aroma this is an absolute Sledgehammer it is Big intense uh in every way shape and form huge aned flavor backed up by phenol flavor PL it cleaned up on the end with that licorice rooty sort of thing going on it does have enough herbaceousness and litness coming from the wormwood to kind of clean it up and balance it but it's not nearly as herbal as the 1700's uh absent they made this does have more of that black Jelly Bean flavor but in the best possible way it's like black jelly beans for grown-ups I cannot recommend this enough guys uh if you have the equipment and you're interested in trying it give it a nudge if it's not quite for you and it is is too much like black jelly beans try the 1700s recipe and of course Ellen and I in the future will be following up with the next step in history and eventually we'll kind of get up to contemporary absence and that's where I'm going to get to play around and uh make my own recipe so I hope that you found this as enjoyable to watch as I've found it to make it this was this was a blast man like I am not a huge history buff but learning these kind of things about history and then putting it into practice with a specific recipe there's a really interesting sense of fulfillment accomplishment somewhere in between the two I don't know but it it's a whole lot of fun so if you have any interest in absent whatsoever I would thoroughly suggest giving this one a go it is approachable it's delicious kind of interesting to drink too uh and I know the Botanicals are hard to find uh in New Zealand you can get some of them on CHAS the craft.com inica America you'll find it a little bit easier Amazon or something like iherbs probably your friend but I am going to go finish the rest of this class and I'll see you guys later bye

Channel: Still It

Views: 106,899

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Id: 1yO6iS5kFOc

Length: 31min 11sec (1871 seconds)

Published: Fri May 24 2024