Post #564788 by TorchGuy on Fri, Nov 12, 2010 6:22 PM

Also...

My mom called me a few months ago, told me she was off to Arizona by car and asked if she could bring me some liquor. I, naturally, accepted, and asked for St. Germain and "Lucid if it's under $60". She called me from Arizona and said "Lucid was $65, so I got this other brand. It's in a really beautiful etched bottle". Mr. Moto, you can probably guess where this is headed. I asked if it was called Le Tourment Vert; she replied in the affirmative. My heart sank. I asked if she could return it, and she told me she loved the bottle. Trying to stay at least semi-polite, I told her to buy one of the minis for the bottle. She took back the big one and brought me more St. Germain; who am I to turn down a double order of 'magic in a bottle'? I brought the Le Tourment Vert to Murray at Zig Zag Cafe in Seattle - they carry five or six brands of absinthe and I trust his mixing implicitly, so I asked him if he knew of anything to do with the stuff. He handed the bottle back, shrugged and told me, "We got this a few months ago. Tried it, hated it, sent it back". Did I mention that I trust Murray?

I wo0n't call it undrinkable; a friend in California, who usually sticks to Lucid or Kubler, bought some of this (he had just moved back to San Jose after a decade away and didn't know how to find a BevMo, or about Beltramo's) and claimed he could make it louche using--- ginger ale?? I KNOW water won't do it, because I tried some of his bottle and toyed with it a bit to see if I could force it somehow. Lucid is easy; I once put a measure of that in a big snifter he had, just as an experiment, set a sugar cube in the middle, poured a thin stream of water onto the cube and, surprisingly, got a full louche with no undissolved sugar!