Editorial note

This page has existed on Absinthe Kits since the site's earliest days. It began as a warning attached to a shop. The shop is long gone, and what follows is a plain statement of what this site is now and how its material should be read.

This is a reference site

Absinthe Kits publishes historical, botanical and cultural material about absinthe. It sells nothing. There is no shop, no catalogue, no ordering, no price list and no way to buy anything here, and there are no recommendations of anyone else to buy from either. Nothing on this site should be read as an offer, an inducement or an encouragement to make, obtain or drink absinthe or any other alcoholic drink.

Absinthe is a strong alcoholic drink

That is the most important fact about it and the one this site returns to repeatedly, because the mythology consistently obscures it. Absinthe is typically bottled between 45% and 74% alcohol by volume. Any discussion here of its history, its herbs or its effects is a discussion of the historical record, not a description of what it would do to a reader.

No health claims

Wormwood and the other botanicals described on this site have long folk-medical histories. Those histories are reported here as history — what people in particular times and places believed and did — and not as information about what any plant or preparation does, treats or is good for. Nothing here is medical advice. Where nineteenth-century writers made claims about absinthe “illuminating the mind” or about its effects on perception, those claims are presented as period opinion and are, on the modern evidence set out under thujone, not supported.

No instructions

The pages describing maceration, colouring and filtration are accounts of how the drink has historically been made. They are deliberately written as description rather than as method: there are no quantities, no timings and no procedures to follow. Home distillation of spirits is illegal in most jurisdictions, and this site does not describe it.

Law varies

Absinthe is legal in most of the world today, subject to limits on thujone content that differ between jurisdictions, and the herbs it is made from are ordinary items of commerce. Nothing here is legal advice, and readers are responsible for the law where they are.

On the archive

This site restores material originally published on absinthekits.com between roughly 1997 and 2020, when the domain was operated as a small mail-order absinthe herb-kit business. The historical, botanical and cultural writing has been preserved and extended. The commercial material — prices, ordering, shipping, payment, contact details and the age-and-liability gate this page once was — has been removed in full and is not reproduced anywhere on the site. The original proprietor's first-person essays are restored in substance and rewritten in this site's own voice; no personal details, credentials or biography beyond what the archive itself showed have been added.

The site is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any current producer, retailer or distributor of absinthe or absinthe-making materials, nor with any of the brands, museums, publishers or public bodies mentioned or linked from these pages.

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