Anatomy of a home absinthe kit
A record of how the Absinthe Kits packages were composed, restored from the site's own descriptions. Nothing here is offered for sale; there are no prices, no ordering and no shipping information on this page.
The idea
An infusion kit solves a specific problem. Distilling spirits at home is illegal in most countries and needs equipment nobody has in a kitchen. Macerating botanicals in a spirit you have bought is neither. So a kit of this kind supplies exactly the part that is hard to get — a correctly proportioned charge of the right herbs, correctly dried — and leaves the alcohol, the equipment and the patience to the person making it.
The trade-off is real and worth stating: a cold infusion is not the same drink as a distillate. Maceration extracts the water-soluble bitter principles that a still leaves behind, so an infused absinthe is greener, more vegetal and considerably more bitter than anything that came out of Pontarlier. It is an old and legitimate method — the Henriod preparation was almost certainly a maceration — but it is a different animal.
The herb charge
The centre of the kit was the herbs: a proportioned mix built on wormwood, with the supporting botanicals weighed against it. The later two-litre kits described the wormwood specifically as wild-picked and slow-dried, and the site treated that as the component everything else depended on. The full lists are set out under what went into a kit.
The filters
Three filters were supplied with the later kits, described as lab-quality and made to specification. This is the least glamorous component and probably the most important. A herb maceration leaves behind a great deal of fine particulate — leaf fragments, hairs, resin — and a coarse strain through muslin removes almost none of it. Left in, it drops out as a haze and continues to extract bitterness for weeks after the steep should have stopped. Anyone who has made a herbal infusion and ended up with something cloudy and increasingly undrinkable has met the problem the filters exist to solve.
The spoons
Two slotted absinthe spoons came with each kit, in two designs the site had made for it.
The Eye Spoon carried an open eye motif, glossed as the metaphorical eye-opening the drink was traditionally credited with. The Fée Satanique spoon carried the initials FS — the Devil's Fairy in French, a nod to the fact that absinthe, being history's most argued-over drink, has collected as many hostile nicknames as affectionate ones. Green Fairy and Green Goddess on one side of the ledger; a rather more diabolical cast of names on the other.
Functionally, the design of a slotted spoon is the same whatever is engraved on it: a flat perforated bowl wide enough to bridge the rim of the glass and hold a sugar cube while iced water is poured through it. There is more on how the object is used under the ritual.
The sugar
Two dozen shaped sugar cubes came with the later kits, pressed into hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades. Sugar is optional in the ritual and always was — a well-balanced absinthe does not need it, and in the nineteenth century its use marked out the drinker who found the bitterness hard going. It persists because it is pleasant to watch: the cube dissolving slowly through the slots as the water goes through is the part of the ritual that made it a ritual.
The labels and the guide
Two self-adhesive bottle labels and a printed “how to make absinthe” guide completed the package, along with a page of drink recipes in the earlier versions. The labels are a small thing that says something about the kits' intent: the finished bottle was meant to be a finished bottle, corked and labelled and put on a shelf, not a jar of something in the back of a cupboard.
What was on this page and is not here now
The original version of this page was the site's order form: quantities, prices in dollars and euros, shipping options, a currency selector and a checkout button. None of that is restored. The descriptive material is, because it is a reasonably detailed record of how one small producer thought a home absinthe kit ought to be put together.
Absinthe Kits · absinthekits.com