I Made A Historic 1700's Absinth

absinthe there is a whole lot of intrigue and mystery around this distilled spirit so I decided I wanted to go way back in time and try and get to the heart of what this beverage really is by creating a historic 1700s absent going Chasers I hope you're having a kick-ass week I'm Jesse this is still it and today we're creating a historic 1700s absinthe this is something that I am completely and utterly unqualified for so I decided they needed a spirit guide Alan Bishop helps me out with all of the details he is the head distiller over at spirits of French Lick a absent Enthusiast and historian so a huge thank you to Alan for supplying all of the nitty-gritty details needed for this video we actually recorded a podcast together about absinthe and a whole lot of other things as well if you want to go into more detail check the link in the description down below I decided to go back to the 1700s for this video because that is kind of the birthplace the the absolute conception of what we would consider absent today something that's vaguely recognizable as absinthe to us but to explain that we need to go back in time even a little bit further by the 1500s Winwood was being used extensively all throughout Europe to treat different medical ailments like intestinal worms and digestion problems but from here on in let's focus specifically on the region of the Swiss Alps because that's where absinthe has its birthplace if we fast forward up to the 1700s in the Swiss Alps we know that the folk witches or hedge witches whatever title you want to put on those purveyors of Medicine of the time we're creating aromatized wine with all of the Botanicals that they had available to them to treat different ailments and one of those herbs or Botanicals as you've probably guessed already was wormwood by the way the scientific name for wormwood is Artemisia absintheum which is how absinthe gets its name by the mid-1700s they were starting to create absinthe extract essentially they were taking all of the Botanicals they were using before in the aromatic wines but steeping them instead in a distilled Brandy it wasn't until something more like 1770 or 1780 where their absent extract was actually redistilled again creating what we would recognize now as absinthe it does have some slight but distinct differences to a absent that you would generally find on the shelves today so I want to create absinthe like it was back then at its birthplace in the 1700s first up I'm going to need a base spirit and historically like I said earlier on this would have been made with fermented and distilled grapes but Alan has suggested a sort of a a pseudo replacement for this that's a whole lot easier to make and if you want to try this at home I'd suggest you give it a go too by the time it's been distilled multiple times and crammed full of Botanicals that's going to be a pretty close approximation first up 25 liters of hot water followed by 14 kilograms of table sugar one kilogram of raisins and one kilogram of Oats a quick Blitz with the electric drill will help dissolve the sugar and I'm going to let it sit for 15 minutes just to soften the the raisins up a little bit followed by another real thrashing with the drill and the idea here was I was just trying to break the raisins up a little bit don't need them to be pulp just need to break the skin to expose them to the wash then you can tuck the whole concoction off to a total volume of around about 90 liters by the way imperial units Freedom Units popping up all over the place but there will be a full recipe for both metric and Imperial in the description below I'm topping it up with cold water to try and reach a temperature of around about 22 degrees Celsius Fahrenheit the raisins of the air to impersonate the grape flavor I mean they are grapes and you would be surprised how much flavor you're going to get out of just one kilo of raisins pretty nuts the oats are there to make this a little bit more silky a little bit of a softer mouth feel uh and to sort of combat the facts that we're using table sugar next up is yeast I'm going to be using EC triple one eight because it's the only Brandy yeast that I have on hand and to be honest it's a damn good Doer it just does its job well four tablespoons of EC triple one eight this time to be fair fermentation was a little bit slow to ramp up with this one but after a few days it had built into a very vibrant and healthy fermentation I totally forgot last time when I introduced the easy dense to you to show you these cool little graphs that it does uh great for the fermentation nerd even better for the fermentation YouTuber because you know visuals all start to be the same after a while but anyway nine days later it had fermented out it's completely dry with a total ABV of 7.7 percent I think I topped it up with slightly too much water doing this by eye that's how they would have done everything back then so I'm really not stressed about it but in any case it's time to distill the stuff so remember we are trying to imitate the Swiss Alps in the mid to late 1700s and the technology they would have had then for distilling was undoubtedly a pot still and our goal here is to get a spirit to 170 proof or what's that 85 ABV to macerate so we're going to have to do multiple distillations I'm going to use three different Stills throughout the course of today's video and they don't look none of them look much like these stores that they would have used back then but they're essentially exactly the same technology and they all have common parts that make them a pot store first of all you're going to have a pot funnily enough and this is where we're going to put the fermented brandy or wash in later on the low ones the liquid the Brandy the wash whatever you want to call it goes into here where we can heat it to its boiling point and start evaporating next of all we've got something that goes on the top seals onto the top of the pot because we're talking pot Stills here there's not a lot to it all of these bits that set up on top do very simple things so the vapor is going to come up into here and you either have a dome an onion or a column depending on the exact pot still you're talking about it it sort of collects all the vapor and forces it into the line arm which takes it over into the condenser and the condenser is going to cool The Vapor down in my case I'm using water to cool it to recondense it into liquid and then we're going to be able to collect the liquid dripping out of the spout a super basic technique or technology whatever you want to call it that hasn't changed for a long time all right team time to say a huge thank you to the sponsor of today's show clocks and colors clocks and colors are one of the longest running sponsors on the show for two reasons one I love this stuff and two uh they're just really easy to work with clocks and colors have a giant range of rings bracelets chains even kind of like random accessories and you've probably seen me wearing a bunch of this stuff over the last few years so when they reached out this time I said sure what have you got that would appear with absinthe we settled on two options first of all the Alchemist for obvious reasons making the stuff makes you feel like a freaking Alchemist uh in two and number two Glory because I mean that is a pretty sweet green stone once again absinthe in the end I ended up going with The Alchemist because I mean come on it just seems fitting the stuff really is like Alchemy so uh here we go long story short clocks and colors and I have 10 dumps to put together a little competition for you all you need to do to enter is use the special link in the description down below to sign up for their mailing list and uh the winner will be emailed in about a week directly and you will win a 500 gift card from clocks and colors and I'm going to send you a little goodie bag as well including some of the new chase the craft maturation sticks so sign up with the special link in the description below so the washer Brandy gets scooped into the pot heat it up turned into vapor forced over into the condenser where we can turn it back into liquid and we collect the stuff dripping off the side this is our stripping runs I'm not doing anything in terms of making Cuts or deciding what the stuff tastes like at this point in time all we're doing is cutting down volume and we're going to keep repeating this step until the fermenter is dry and we have a whole lot of newly distilled liquid that can go back into the pot and do exactly the same thing again this time on the second distillation I am going to make a small amount of adjustment by cuts to the distillate that we're creating I'm going to take a small amount of four shots Stitch those in a relatively small amount of heads and ditch those and because it's not a particularly good idea to put Spirit over the strength of 40 ABV back into it still I just let the still run continuously until the liquid I was collecting was at a average ABV of 39 ABV and then it all went back into the still again for the third distillation this is where I switched Stills over to the one that I just showed you before and I did perform some Proper Cuts on this one the heads cut here was essentially to cut out that weird kind of potpourri sweet rubber just strange headsy alcohol flavor and taste out of a spirit at which point I could switch over to a larger vessel and just keep collecting but I screwed up I have been doing this for six years and I have so far managed to avoid heartache in The Distillery this night however I managed to punch the collection jar with the camera thankfully the camera was okay but I did lose a little over I think a little over three liters of wonderful spirit let this be a reminder to all of you to be on your game and be careful when you're distilling nothing bad happened to me but if I was running direct fire it could have been a very different story so be careful Tim thankfully I was able to salvage enough distillate to carry on with this episode but if you want some more details on on exactly what happened I'll stick them in the description down below for you now it's time to macerate our Botanicals and I'm going to be doing a batch with two liters of what should be 85 ABV but mine ended up at 83 like I said check down there and we need to heat that up to 170 degrees Fahrenheit or 76 degrees Celsius now guys please make sure you're monitoring this while you're doing it and don't don't let it overheat you don't want to do that while this is heating up we're going to get our Botanicals weighed out and ready now Allen made sure to point out that these are all kind of approximate these recipes the the references they have to what the recipes actually were are all in like handfuls of Botanicals so you do have some wiggle room obviously and even if you're working in Imperial and Freedom Units guys I'm going to use grams because it's just so much easier for this kind of thing I almost guarantee you that whatever scale you have that is weighing stuff out for you there'll be a button on it to switch it over to grams just use 10. first up the star of our show wimwood at 90 grams this is on the heavy side for a modern absinthe but absence from the 1700s were much more wormwood forward than they are today when would a man I don't I don't know how to describe the flavor that wormwood in Parts other than its a herbal wormwood flavor and it also provides a really solid bitterness next up a nice this gives that stereotypical what people think of today as absinthe black licorice flavor but it was an important ingredient for them back in the 1700s in the Swiss Alps and they would have used it fairly sparingly it was expensive today we are using 53 grams we also need 53 grams of fennel 26 grams of dried mint 50 33 grams of lemon balm and 5 grams of Angelica seed so absinthe is not cheap to make by any stretch of the imagination there is a lot of Botanicals and guys they can be really freaking hard to find do your best have a hunt around if you're struggling to find a certain ingredient I'd suggest starting to look at kind of like hippie health food stores they'll often sell the stuff as tea but for those of you in New Zealand I'm currently doing a giant makeover of chasercraft.com and when that's finished you'll be able to buy most of these Botanicals directly from there once the spirit's up to temperature all of the Botanicals go in once again double check the heat is off and we're going to let these macerate or digest for 24 hours [Music] this has been macerating digesting four 24 hours now and I gotta say it is smelling freaking fantastic but remember the spirit we put in here was like what 80 two and a half percent or something like that we need to bring that down just put it through the calculator and it comes out at where are we a little over two liters we need to put in here now I'm actually going to split this batch I'm going to proof it down and split it in two and the reason is that well it's twofold one is that this is getting kind of full uh and Alan warned me of the fact that this will foam up a fair bit but two I also kind of want to show you the way that traditionally Cuts were handled for distillation as well in terms of absence our still is up to temperature and it is running obviously now I'm going to take a little teeny tiny bit off the top I'm not worried about Cuts in the traditional sense here it's just Botanicals and still do weird things often at the very beginning and Alan suggested that this would happen with absinthe as well so we're going to take that but oh wow all right so now I'm just going to run this still and I'm going to monitor the ABV uh and cut it off right around 60 ADV that seems to be where The Sweet Spot is uh I'll be tasting it along the way as well too because if you haven't run a pot still like this with a bunch of different Botanicals in it it's very very interesting because the different flavors come off at different times throughout the run so right now dude I didn't even know how to describe that that is crazy we've just switched over to the second jar we are currently at around about 75 ABV what's that 150 proof and while this was happening hmm oh uh I went through all the the herbs that are in this and had a smell to try and reorientate myself and if I had to go back and describe what I think happens during the run it seemed like the wormwood came up front it had a lot more kind of herbal just plant matter kind of flavor to it and a lot more bitterness through lemon wood big a nice in the middle and we've just switched [Music] to getting a lot more mint which is interesting it's pretty freaking uh intriguing and satisfying I have to say but I'll see you at 60 ABV okay we have hit 60 ABV um still tasting fine now but I am going to trust Ellen on this one and cut over at this point in time so here's uh why I wanted to do this and show you these are our hearts this is going to go into this is what we're going to bottle we're going to run from 60 or 120 proof down to 40 percent or 80 proof this is the spirit that I collected from 60 or 120 proof down to 40 or 80 proof and this actually has a slight green tinge to it which is kind of interesting and right now I am collecting below 40 and what you'll probably notice is it starts going quite cloudy quite quickly now there is a downside to using uh this little air stool and that is that because you don't have any power control on it when you start getting down near the end of a run like this it starts running really freaking slowly uh so I'm gonna be here for a little while but there is a giant advantage to this which I'll talk about in a second and a trap that if you have a different kind of still you may have fallen into I am going to call that done and while the last few drips come out of there as it's cooling down I'm going to explain what happens with this this would then be added back in to the next distillation of the spirit so not back into the still with Botanicals when you're rectifying the Brandy to create the high proof spirit this would go back into there so we're not wasting it so we can put that aside because I'm not going to be doing that in this video this on the other hand we are going to use so the Stills empty there I just gave it a quick rinse with uh with water and we can add back in all of this lovely stuff which we reserved earlier on and what we're going to do is pop this back in there as well why are we doing that well basically we're just trying to uh compound the amount of oils flavoring Aroma all that stuff from the Botanicals over and over again in our absent the same as using you know tails for whiskey I've already proofed this down it's right around 40 ABV so we are good to roll again so what is the big advantage of the ear still the big Advantage is you don't have to worry about scorching that was damn near solid not liquid at all it's very very easy to Scorch something like this at a standard still this thing I it does a damn good job of it I have yet to actually Scorch something in it if you're operating a standard still and you're wanting to do this Allen had some really excellent tips in that podcast that basically consisted of putting all of the herbs into a bag a cotton bag or something like that that has a fine weave it's essentially act as a giant tea bag and then lining the bottom of the still so the cotton won't burn either he uses I think it was um mason jars kind of like makes a grid of mason jars and then puts the bag on top and then all the liquid in on top of that thankfully I don't need to do that anyway I'm going to do exactly the same thing with this run as I did with the last so we just made absinthe blue or white absinthe clear absinthe and I'm going to hesit a guess that even back then in the 1700s that a lot of absinthe was drunk consumed just like this but remember that it wasn't long before that the absinthe was made in a very different way and it would have had a very distinct coloring when it was so the guess is that they started coloring this distilled absent almost like an absinthe branding exercise people were used to seeing it look a certain way to have a color to it so they colored it after distillation so people recognized it as the same thing back then there was two primary sources of coloration number one hyssop which is still used extensively today in absinthe and number two spinach of all things go figure now we need to split the batch we're only going to color 48 of the distillate that we got off the still now's a really good time to mention that a lot of the ingredients techniques ideas that were happening in absinthe back then probably had ulterior motives other than just the flavor and the contents of what was coming out is it really important that you only color 48 of the batch instead of 50 probably not no it's probably likely that things like this fraction had a like a a higher meaning to the people that were creating it what those specifically are I have no idea and I wouldn't like to speculate but you know chances are that the 4852 split had some kind of spiritual or cultural significance all of that to say I want to do it that way today because that's how we know it was done back then but once again you've got some wiggle room if you're making it yourself anyway we need to bring the portion of the distal that we're going to color up to 140 degrees Fahrenheit or 60 uh yes 60 degrees Celsius and while we're doing that let's get our Botanicals weighed out so we're going to need two grams of hyssop and three grams of spinach once the spirit is heated I'm going to use a little strainer and pour the liquid over the top and the reason for that is that Alan suggested that on this scale chances are it may only need you know like four to six minutes of actually macerating to get the color and flavor we're looking for when I did it I got to four minutes decided I want a little bit more so I took it up to 12 minutes in total at which point I ended up pulling it now we can combine the colored absinthe and the white absinthe back together and proof it down to bottling proof for me I settled on 62 ABV and we ended up with this absence I gotta say guys I'm actually pretty happy to get to this point because I've been wanting to do this for a long time and I knew that it was going to take uh a little bit of help to get me there so thanks Ellen I appreciate it man I really do um anyway so first of all uh the color it is a little bit lighter than I had uh anticipated or hoped for I don't know how accurate that is traditionally uh Alan will be in the comments I'm sure so pipe up dude let me know what you think this kind of thing is always a little bit hard to show on camera so I'll also send you a sample mate and you can give us a better breakdown of what you think the spirits are like but anyway over here I also have a Wii sample of the only other absent I have on hand which is from Spirits of French Lick they're absinthe blue Alan did mention to me that this is kind of specifically designed to fit the palette of the modern American and it's honestly the only reference I have I also do not have any of the fancy fountains or spoons or anything like that so I'm just going to be doing this with a syringe actually let's do Allen's first um now the big thing here is that I am hoping that mine looshes similarly uh to his so I'm using a syringe to kind of measure uh the amount of water I'm putting in there if you want to drink absinthe with sugar obviously that's totally fine I'm just going to give it a nudge as they both are right now so that's about one and a half times as much water as spirit and it is getting a really solid loosh on it now I can still definitely see a small line of kind of alcohol sitting on top we've got a little bit further that is now roughly two and a half times the volume of water and that is looking beautiful to me all right let's do the same with mine and see what happens I guess that is equal spirits of water uh and it's definitely starting to lose I don't think it's dramatically is this but uh let's keep going and see why don't I uh move them next to each other so we can see a little better that's pretty close to apples with apples I think and there is definitely a slightly more opaque quality to this but I'm happy with that I'm not gonna lie I'm kind of excited for this first of all the the more modern version man that's beautiful um so much perceived sweetness heaps of black licorice this to me is what absinthe is this is what I've had before to be honest it's done better than what I've had before it's kind of like uzo with a slightly more herbal medicinal flavoring to it anyway let's give mine a try whoa okay I need to grab some wormwood hold on I don't know how to describe that if I had to go out on a limb I would say somewhere between like dandelions not the flower the um the the foliage smushed up and Juniper of all things it's definitely in here though and the other thing that's coming through a lot is the mint mouth feels really different this feels sweet on the tongue it's not sweet it's not sugar it's the perception of sweetness all of those sweet Botanicals maybe there's something like a licorice root and yeah that kind of almost stevia-like component um the perception of sweetness without sweetness this one hits heavier on the tongue I guess it's more it's more herbal I'm tasting all of the components in there I'm definitely tasting wormwood that is to my untrained pellet the the the the strongest component in this uh lemon balm is there for sure uh the mint cleans everything up at the end and the aniseed kind of hums along in the middle part of the pellet whereas this one finishes like you just swallowed a black Jelly Bean in a good way so have I succeeded I mean yeah I made a thing here it is um I don't know how to tell you whether I did a wonderful job or an average job at best I'm gonna have to send a bottle to Alan uh and we'll team up further on down the track and uh he can roast my 1700s absinthe if you had to served this to me before I'd gone through all of this and told me it was absent I would have said you're crazy because the more I think about it I just think of absinthe as being almost the same thing as uzo it's anise I gotta say guys this is kind of a crazy experience I've never made anything anything like this um and I think I might be starting to fall in love I need to explore the entire world of absinthe so anyway I need to say a huge thank you to the patreons thank you so much guys for being the people that support me day in day out that let me do these crazy things for a job uh thank you guys thank you so freaking much now I want to hear from you guys whether or not you've made absent what kind of absinthe did you make what style of absinthe did you make and how did it turn out because I need to make more absent videos all right guys I'll catch you next time see ya

Channel: Still It

Views: 665,902

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Id: CueOEfqgIEo

Length: 28min 38sec (1718 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 13 2022