The book was finished. Written, edited, designed, printed, and sitting on bookstore shelves. People were buying it after three years of creating it.

Pens down, remember? One thing I hadn’t done was visit bookstores, at least not until the book was done and I wanted to share it. Get it out there.

When I launched my first absinthe, I visited bars and talked to bartenders. I wanted to know which bottles they like and which they don’t. What doesn’t fit their hand, and what feels good when they have a rush.

I didn’t do that with the book, save the cocktail books I own. My vision was to produce a book similar to Barnaby Conrad’s Absinthe: History in a Bottle. Once I switched to sales mode, I started looking at the other books on those shelves.

At Tales of the Cocktail, at Octavia Books, at the Southern Food & Beverage Museum, I kept noticing the same thing. Many of the cocktail, spirits, and food books I was drawn to were small hardcovers.

They felt substantial without being enormous. Beautiful enough to give as a gift. Easy enough to pick up and flip through. They looked like objects meant to be kept.

The wheels began to turn.

The first edition of The Green Fairy’s Canvas is a 7 × 10 paperback. I chose that format deliberately. It gave the artwork room, kept the price accessible, and most importantly, allowed me to get the book into the world.

I had spent years thinking about what belonged inside my book.
The arc.
The paintings.
The history.
The mythology.
The cover.
The typography.
The captions.
The stories I wanted to rescue from nearly two centuries of absinthe lies and rumours.

I had thought endlessly about the book as an idea.

Now I was thinking about the book as a thing, something you see across a bookstore and pick up. Feel it in your hands, purchase for yourself or as a gift.

Something you leave on a coffee table because the cover is too beautiful to hide on a shelf.

That changed things. I realized I may not need one definitive version of The Green Fairy’s Canvas. I may need two.

For bookstores, I’m now envisioning a smaller hardcover edition, roughly 6 × 8. Something that feels at home among the beautiful little cocktail and art books on the bookstore shelves where mine belongs.

I am working on a Kickstarter edition, which will be another format of the book. That book wants to be big!

An 11 × 8.5 hardcover coffee-table book, where the paintings can stretch across the page and Natalia’s illustration has room to breathe. The kind of book you don’t just read, but leave out because you want people to see it.

And because I don’t know when to stop, I’m also planning a very limited ten leather-bound collector’s editions.

If you’re going to summon the Green Fairy, she’ll want to dress for the occasion.

The paperback did exactly what I needed it to do: it got the book out of my computer and into my hands, then into readers’ hands. It got me behind a signing table at the Ritz and into bookstores. It put the book beside other books and gave me the opportunity to see it not as its creator, but as part of a marketplace.

The paperback wasn’t the wrong book, it was the book that got me into the room. Once I was in the room, I could see what came next.

I think that’s one of the strangest things about making anything. You can research and plan and obsess over every decision, but there are things you simply cannot learn until the thing exists.

Eventually, you have to make it. Put it on the shelf. Watch what happens. And listen to what it teaches you.

Apparently, “pens down” doesn’t mean you’re finished.

It just means you finally have something real enough to learn from.

Next week in The Green Fairy’s Journal

Part 7: The Kickstarter

Bringing something beautiful into the world.

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Selling eleven books at my first signing felt incredible. I was sitting behind the table, talking about the book, explaining the story behind it, and signing it. My friend/assistant Elyse was practically corralling people in my direction.

I was, in other words, very much involved in the sale.

A bookstore is different.

A bookstore has to decide which books deserve shelf space.

After Tales of the Cocktail, I started doing something that felt mildly terrifying: walking into bookstores with copies of my own book.

I live in New Orleans, a city with extraordinary independent bookstores, which somehow made this more intimidating rather than less. These are people who spend their lives surrounded by books. They know what sells. They know what belongs on their shelves.

And I was walking in saying, essentially:

Hi. I made this. Would you like it?

There is no amount of entrepreneurship that makes that feel entirely normal.

I had spent years selling Absinthe, so I understood sales. I could walk into a bar and explain exactly why my bottle belonged on the backbar.

Books are different. A bottle gets emptied. A book gets kept.

I wanted The Green Fairy’s Canvas to feel like something someone would discover in New Orleans and want to take home.

Then I started hearing yes.

Pirate’s Alley Café, where I bartend, gave me permission to sell the book behind the bar. Not just when I’m working, either. My coworkers can sell it when I’m not there.

Dauphine Books took copies. Arcadian Books took copies.

Then the Southern Food & Beverage Museum bought five.

Five books felt like a life-changing order. Not because five books would change my life, but because I wasn't selling five books to five readers. Someone else was saying, I can find five readers for this.

That’s an entirely different kind of validation. Suddenly, the book began having a life that didn’t require me to be standing next to it.

Someone could walk into a shop while I was behind the bar at Pirate’s Alley, or at home working, or walking the dogs, and find something I’d spent years creating.

They might pick it up without knowing who I was. They might open to Degas. Or Manet. Or take their time looking at Natalia Kadish’s cover illustration. They might read a paragraph. Maybe they’d take it to the counter.

I wouldn’t even know it had happened.

For someone who had spent years controlling every sentence, every image, every revision, there was something deliciously unsettling about that.

The book was leaving me.

That was the entire point.

At the Ritz, I learned that I could sell my book. The bookstores taught me something more important:

The book might be able to sell without me.

For the first time, I began to understand what “published” really meant. It wasn’t simply that the book existed. It was that the book had started going places without me.

As an entrepreneur, I’m accustomed to controlling so much about my business and my life. There is something poignant about deliberately giving up control of this.

I’m sending the book out into the world now, to find its readers in ways I can’t predict.

That’s what I wanted all along.

Next week in The Green Fairy’s Journal

The Book Was Finished. Then I Started Looking at the Bookshelves.

I wanted a larger paperback to showcase the art, similar to Barnaby Conrad’s History in a Bottle, but when I looked at the shelves, the books that felt at home in these shops were often smaller hardcovers. Beautiful objects someone could pick up, flip through and take home.

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Then one afternoon, it belonged to someone else. Eleven someone elses.

The first signing was at the Ritz-Carlton in New Orleans during Tales of the Cocktail.

It felt full circle.

Years earlier, I’d stayed at the Ritz as a visitor, attending Tales and dreaming about what my future in the spirits world might look like. This time, I walked through those same doors as a New Orleanian, a distiller…and an author.

That still feels surreal to write.

I wasn’t alone. My friend Elyse had called in sick for the entire week just to be there with me.

She spent those days doing everything an author never thinks about when they’re writing a book. She took photographs. Kept me hydrated. Brought me cocktails - this was Tales, after all. She drew people to the table to see the book.

She believed in the book enough to spend her PTO helping me share it.

I’ll never forget that.

I was so nervous when the signing began. I wandered around the bookstore, saw books by people I know, and books that were in my shelf at home.

I spent years writing in private. Barely anyone knew I was working in a book. I didn’t know how to stop writing. How to stop editing. How to print a book. Suddenly, six boxes arrived on my porch, and I was sitting behind a table wondering if anyone will stop.

People did.

Some already knew me through Absinthe. Some had followed my journey. Some were simply curious.

By the end of that first hour, I’d sold eleven books.

Eleven.

It wasn’t a bestseller list.

It wasn’t a viral moment.

But it was eleven people who decided this story was worth taking home.

Then something happened I hadn’t expected.

The buyer for Octavia Books came out of the store and over to my table.

He picked up the book and spent a few minutes flipping through it.

Finally, he looked up and said,

“This is really something. I’ve never seen a first time author sell as well as you have today.”

I’ve replayed that moment in my head more times than I can count.

Not because it guaranteed anything. It didn’t. It came from someone who looks at books for a living.

Someone with no obligation to encourage me.

Sometimes, a single sentence arrives at exactly the right moment.

For years, I’d been asking whether the story I wanted to tell mattered.

Looking back, I remember the eleven books. I remember the conversation with Octavia. More than anything, I remember looking over and seeing Elyse smiling from the end of the table.

Before there were readers, there were people who believed the book deserved to exist.

Sometimes that’s enough to get you to the next chapter.

Next week in

The Green Fairy’s Journal

The Book Finds a Home

The first time I walked into a bookstore and saw my work on the shelf.

There was always one more thing I could do to make the book better. Then, one day, there wasn’t. At least, that’s what I told myself.

The truth is, I could probably spend the rest of my life changing commas, editing paragraphs, and finding one more source that deserved to be included.

At some point, finishing becomes a decision, not because the work is perfect, but because it’s time to let it belong to someone else.

That sounds liberating. It isn’t. Writing is private. Publishing is not.

For years, the only question I had to answer was, Is this true?

Now I’m asking a different one, Will anyone care?

That question feels far more vulnerable.

When I started writing The Green Fairy’s Canvas, there was no audience waiting for it. No publisher asking for a manuscript. No guarantee anyone wanted a book that explored Absinthe through art, history, politics, and culture.

There was only a question I couldn’t stop asking.

Somewhere along the way, that question became a manuscript. Now it has to become something else. A book on a shelf. A conversation. A recommendation between friends. Something a stranger picks up because the cover catches their eye. That transition is terrifying.

I’ve spent years trying to make sure every sentence earned its place.

Now I’m learning that books don’t simply find readers. Authors have to find them.

So here I am, once again, learning a completely different craft.

That includes building this Substack, planning a Kickstarter, talking to bookstores.

It also includes designing bookmarks and cocktail cards, preparing for Tales of the Cocktail, where the book will launch.

Trying to remember that sharing my work isn’t vanity. It’s the final step of making it.

People often say writing a book is hard. They’re right, but nobody tells you that once you put your pen down, the work simply changes.

It doesn’t end, and honestly...I’m not sure which part scares me more.

The first phase is complete. The book is arriving this week. Now the job changes.

Next week in The Green Fairy’s Journal:

The First Time a Stranger Bought My Book

Because that moment changed everything.

Do I start counting on September 28, 2023, when I had my AHA moment at the Met’s Manet/Degas exhibit? When I wrote an outline in Google docs? Or nearly thirty years ago, when I first began asking why everyone believed Absinthe made people hallucinate?

I thought writing the book would be the hard part. It wasn’t. The hard part was deciding when to stop.

Every chapter led somewhere I hadn’t expected. One source pointed to another. One painting raised a question that sent me into another archive. One forgotten woman deserved an entire afternoon. History doesn’t unfold in a straight line. It branches, circles back, contradicts itself, and occasionally disappears altogether.

There were moments I became convinced I was almost finished.

Then I’d discover something that quietly unraveled twenty pages I’d already written.

So I’d rewrite them.

Again.

At some point I realized I wasn’t writing a book about Absinthe.

I was following her.

She kept leading me into places I hadn’t planned to go. Into artists I thought I already understood. Into nineteenth-century politics. Into medicine, advertising, café culture, poster and advertising history, forgotten distillers, and women history had quietly erased.

The project became much larger than I had imagined.

While all of this was happening, life refused to pause.

I was relaunching a spirits company after moving from Oakland to New Orleans.

Launching products.

Working nights behind the bar at Pirate’s Alley Café.

Most mornings ended with tea, my laptop, and one more promise that this would finally be the last revision. It almost never was. I heard a podcast with an author who said something I will never forget, “I like the eighth draft.” By then, I had lost count. I didn’t know which was the eighth draft. Maybe I will use that advice next time.

People often ask whether writing this book changed how I see Absinthe. It did. But it also changed how I see history.

I used to think history was something we inherited.

Now I think it’s something we negotiate.

Stories become accepted because they’re repeated often enough. Myths survive because they’re easier than nuance. Sometimes all it takes is one person asking, “But is that actually true?”

That question became this book.

Somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn’t just researching Absinthe anymore. I was learning how myths are made.

The manuscript is finished.

Sometimes you have to hear a professor’s voice in your head saying, “Pens down.”

For the first time in years, I’m beginning to think about what comes after the writing.

Strangely, that feels even more uncertain.

Next week in The Green Fairy's Journal: Part 3 — Pens Down. Now What?

My office was a bar in the French Quarter.

For the twenty months, I’ve spent my nights pouring Traditional Absinthe Drips and Sazeracs beneath the flickering lanterns of Pirate’s Alley Café, explaining Absinthe to tourists from around the world.

Then I’d go home, sometimes at one in the morning, sometimes later. Or is it earlier? Sometimes with the need for sunglasses.

I’d make tea and open InDesign, and I would write until I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. By day I was writing about Belle Époque cafés, and by night I was standing behind one. I guess the Green Fairy has always preferred bars to libraries anyway.

I moved to New Orleans (two years ago next week!) because so much of modern Absinthe history converges in this city. I came because absinthe eventually pulls everyone obsessed with her here. Some people come for jazz. Some for ghosts.

I thought I was moving to build a spirits company, but I also found the final chapters of my book.

The book didn’t begin as a publishing project. It began as a question I pondered beginning nearly 30 years ago.

The deeper I looked, the stranger the answer became. Writing wasn’t the hardest part. Stopping was, because every answer uncovered another question. Another painting. Another forgotten woman. Another myth. Another source to verify. History isn’t a straight line. It’s a spider’s web of archaeology.

There were nights I’d close the bar after explaining Absinthe fifty times or more to customers. Then I’d come home and write another chapter explaining her one more time.

I often wondered if I was crazy, not because of Absinthe (well…maybe), but because I was trying to launch a spirits company...while writing an art history book...while working for tips.

Sometimes the dream is funding itself one shift at a time.

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Next week:
I Thought Writing the Book Would Be the Hard Part.

We’ve inherited a version of Absinthe that is louder than the reality.

More dramatic. More dangerous. More convenient.

When you look closely, at the art, at the culture, at the way it was actually consumed, a different picture emerges.

Not madness.

Not hallucination.

Something quieter.

Absinthe wasn’t a force acting on people.

It was something people gathered around.

The myths that formed around it tell us less about the drink itself and more about the moment it existed in.

Economic shifts. Cultural anxiety. The need to assign blame.

Once that story takes hold, it becomes difficult to separate what is seen from what is said.

That is what I keep coming back to.

Not just what Absinthe is.

But how it was turned into something else.

Because when you strip away the myth, what remains is not dangerous or mysterious.

It’s human.

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Before cocktails, there was this. Sugar was a status symbol, and everyone wanted to be seen during L’Heure Verte with their Absinthe, silver spoon, crystal and silver carafe, and cube of sugar.

Classic Absinthe Preparation

1 oz Absinthe
3–5 oz cold water
Sugar (optional)

Slowly add water.
Watch it cloud.

Absinthe was never just consumed. It was prepared.

That ritual is part of what people were responding to, even when they misunderstood it.

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The Earthquake is often linked to pre-ban Absinthe culture.

High proof. Uncompromising.

Less about balance. More about impact.

It is often attributed to Toulouse-Lautrec, who moved through Montmartre at full intensity, where Absinthe was not treated delicately but as part of the rhythm of the night.

The Earthquake

1 oz Absinthe
1 oz cognac
1 oz whiskey

Stir with ice.
Strain into a glass.

No dilution beyond that.
No softening.

This is not a casual drink. It lands like its name.

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Ernest Hemingway didn’t just drink Absinthe.

He wrote it into ritual.

This is his.

Death in the Afternoon

• 1 oz Absinthe

• 4–5 oz chilled Champagne

Pour Absinthe into a glass.
Top slowly with Champagne.
Watch the louche form.

Simple. Stronger than it looks.

Hemingway’s Advice: “Drink three to five of these, slowly”.

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Absinthe did not begin as the Green Fairy. She began as medicine.

A distilled spirit infused with wormwood and other botanicals, used for its perceived therapeutic properties. Nothing about her, in its earliest form, suggested the mythology that would later surround it.

That mythology came later.

The shift from object to symbol

At some point, Absinthe stopped being understood only as something physical. It became something interpreted. Projected onto.

A surface for ideas about creativity, danger, excess, and desire.

The name “Green Fairy” marks that shift as something not just consumed, but something imagined.

Why a fairy

The choice of a fairy is not accidental. A fairy suggests something just beyond reach. Something that exists between reality and imagination.

Beautiful, but not entirely safe. Inviting, but not entirely understood.

In the cultural context of the late nineteenth century, that ambiguity mattered.

Absinthe was already visually distinctive. Its color, its preparation, its louche made it unlike other drinks.

It lent itself to transformation.

Artists and amplification

Artists did not invent the myth, but they contributed to it. Through posters, paintings, and writing, Absinthe became associated with a particular atmosphere.

Bohemian life. Late nights. Creative circles. But even here, the representation is often quieter than the myth that followed. What appears in the work is not transformation, but mood.

Writers and exaggeration

Writers, however, pushed further.

Absinthe began to appear in literature as something more than a drink.

It became a catalyst.

A presence capable of altering perception.

That shift matters.

Because once a drink is described as having power, it begins to be treated as if it does.

The role of culture

At the same time, broader cultural forces were at work. Urbanization, shifting social structures, and anxieties about modern life created a need for symbols.

Absinthe became one of them.

It could stand in for excess, for moral decline, for artistic rebellion, depending on who was telling the story.

When myth hardens

Over time, the symbolic meaning begins to override the reality. The drink is no longer understood on its own terms.

It is understood through the lens of what people believe it represents. This is the moment when myth hardens into perceived fact.

The Green Fairy was never something contained in the glass. It was something built around it. A way of explaining, projecting, and simplifying a more complex reality. Once that story took hold, it began to replace the thing itself.

If Absinthe started as medicine, and became myth, then what we inherit is not the drink. It’s the story that was told about it.

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The Sazerac wasn’t originally a whiskey drink. It was made with cognac.

In the mid-nineteenth century, phylloxera devastated European vineyards. Cognac production collapsed along with the vines.

New Orleans adapted. Rye replaced cognac.

The drink changed, but the structure held.

Absinthe was part of that structure.

Even during the ban, when it was replaced with Herbsaint, the role remained.

That substitution was not required by any formal decree, and today, Absinthe should be used as originally intended.

The Absinthe is not meant to be tasted directly, but to shape the aroma of the drink as you lift the glass. In the Sazerac, Absinthe isn’t the drink. It’s the edge of it.

The Sazerac

• 2 oz rye whiskey

• 1 sugar cube

• 2–3 dashes Peychaud’s bitters

• Absinthe (for rinse)

Rinse a chilled glass with Absinthe.
In a separate glass, muddle sugar and bitters.
Add rye and ice.
Stir, then strain into the rinsed glass.
Express a lemon peel.

What changed in the Sazerac wasn’t just the base spirit. It was the result of a larger shift.

When the vineyards failed, everything connected to them moved.

The Sazerac is one of the places you can still see that change.

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If Degas’s L’Absinthe were the only painting of its kind, it might be easier to dismiss it as an isolated moment, shaped by a single artist’s perspective.

But it isn’t.

The same atmosphere appears again and again across different artists and scenes. What repeats is not chaos or spectacle, but something quieter.

A shared stillness.

Absinthe appears most often in cafés. Not in scenes of excess, but in contained, almost restrained moments. A table, a glass, a figure seated, often alone even when someone else is nearby.

This is not the image we’ve inherited. We’ve been taught to expect something more dramatic. But what the artists show is something far more subtle.

The café in late nineteenth-century Paris was more than a place to drink. It was one of the defining spaces of modern life. Public, but personal. Social, but often isolating.

People sat together without necessarily connecting. They occupied the same space, but not the same moment. Absinthe fits into that environment precisely. Not as disruption, but as structure.

The ritual itself matters. Absinthe is not simply poured. It is prepared. Water added slowly. The louche forming in the glass, changing its color and texture over time. It is a visual process, and it cannot be rushed.

That process creates a pause, a defined moment within the day. In a rapidly changing city, that kind of pause becomes significant. It offers a way to sit still, to observe, to exist without immediate interaction.

This is what artists were responding to. Not the chemical effects of a drink, but the experience surrounding it.

The ritual. The stillness. The space between people.

Absinthe becomes a marker of that moment, not of excess, but of a particular kind of attention. A moment that can hold thought, distance, or quiet observation.

Over time, that moment was reinterpreted. The stillness became emptiness. The distance became decline. The pause became evidence of something wrong.

What had once been observational became moralized.

And once that shift occurred, it changed how the entire scene was read. Seen together, the paintings form a pattern. Not of unraveling, but of restraint.

Absinthe appears again and again, but it is rarely the source of action. It is the anchor of a moment, something that gives shape to time rather than disrupting it.

If we follow Absinthe through art, a different story begins to emerge. One that has less to do with madness and more to do with how people moved through a changing world.

How they sat. How they paused. How they occupied space together, and apart.

And once you begin to see that pattern, it becomes difficult to return to the simpler story we were given.

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It is often presented as evidence.

A warning. A decline. A visual argument for the dangers of the drink.

Look closely, and that story begins to fall apart.

A woman sits at a café table, a glass of absinthe in front of her, a man beside her.

This is the image that has been reproduced, interpreted, and used to support a narrative about excess and unraveling. Nothing in the painting is exaggerated. Nothing is distorted. Nothing suggests the kind of transformation the drink was later accused of producing.

The figures are not collapsing. They are not interacting. They are not even looking at one another. They are simply there.

Sitting side by side, entirely separate.

That distance is the point.

Not madness. Not hallucination. Separation.

Degas was not painting the effects of Absinthe.

He was painting modern life.

Paris in the late nineteenth century was changing rapidly. Industrialization, urban density, and shifting social structures altered how people moved through the world and how they experienced one another.

Public spaces were full. Personal connection was not.

The café becomes a setting, not a cause.

A place where people sit together, but remain apart.

Absinthe happens to be present. It is not the subject.

This distinction matters.

Because once the drink is treated as the subject, the painting is read as evidence, and once it is read as evidence, it can be used to support a narrative it was never meant to carry.

The woman’s expression is often described as vacant. But it is not distorted or exaggerated. It is quiet, contained, ambiguous.

There is no spectacle here.

No theatrical decline.

No visual indication of intoxication beyond what one might expect in any café scene.

What we are seeing is not transformation. It is stillness.

That stillness has been misinterpreted.

Reframed as evidence of something else, something more dramatic.

Something easier to point to.

The painting does not change, only the story around it does.

When L’Absinthe is used to support the idea that the drink causes madness or moral collapse, the interpretation says more about the viewer than the work itself. It reflects what people were already prepared to believe.

This is how myth attaches itself to image, not by altering what is there, but by changing how it is read. Once that reading becomes widely accepted, it begins to feel like fact.

The painting did not create the myth. It became one of the places the myth was anchored.

If you return to the image without the story, something else comes into focus.

Not excess. Not unraveling.

Distance.

A quiet, almost ordinary form of isolation.

That is what Degas painted.

The rest is what we were taught to see.

The story we’ve inherited about Absinthe is dramatic:

Madness.
Hallucination.
Creative collapse.

The Green Fairy as a kind of seductive destroyer.

It has been repeated so often that it feels like fact.

But if that story were true, the art would reflect it.

It doesn’t.

The myth we inherited

That story appears in books, in media, in casual conversation.

Even now, people lower their voices slightly when they talk about it, as if there is still something forbidden about the drink itself.

But myths that persist this long are rarely accidental.

They serve a purpose.

What artists actually painted

The artists who lived with Absinthe did not paint chaos, hallucination, or transformation.

They painted stillness. Pause. Distance.

A moment between people. A moment within a person.

In Degas, the figures sit side by side, but they are not together.

In Manet, the drinker is not dissolving into madness.

He is simply there.

Present. Contained. Human.

There is no spectacle. No distortion. No evidence of the dramatic effects the drink was later accused of producing.

If Absinthe had the power it was later said to have, you would expect to see it in the work.

Artists exaggerate. Interpret. Reveal.

What they show instead is something quieter.

Absinthe appears as a ritual. A pause in the day. A structured moment within an otherwise chaotic urban life.

The preparation itself slows everything down.

Water dripping. The louche forming. The glass changing.

It creates space.

Sometimes, that space is what allows the work to happen.

Not because the drink changes the mind, but because it creates the conditions for the mind to shift on its own.

How the image replaced the reality

If the artists were not depicting madness, where did that story come from?

The answer is not in the glass.

It is in the culture that formed around it.

As Absinthe became more visible, more popular, and more economically disruptive, its image began to change.

Writers, critics, and eventually political campaigns reshaped it into something symbolic.

Not just a drink, but a problem.

Something to warn against. Something to blame.

Over time, that constructed image began to overwrite what was actually there.

The disconnect

This is the gap that matters.

What the art shows, and what the story claims.

Not slightly different.

Fundamentally different.

Once that gap becomes visible, it changes how you see everything that follows.

Because if the art is honest, and the story is not, then something has been rewritten.

The paintings did not lie.

They were misread.

Used to support a story they were never telling in the first place.

That misreading is where the myth begins.

And it is exactly where I want to look more closely next.

Because if we go back to Degas, not the story about the painting but the painting itself, something else comes into focus entirely.

Absinthe was banned because it was uniquely dangerous.

It’s a compelling explanation. It’s also not true.

Absinthe was not banned because it was stronger than other spirits. It was not banned because it caused hallucinations or a special form of madness. It was banned because a series of economic, social, and political forces converged at the same moment, and Absinthe became the most visible target.

To understand how this happened, we have to begin not in the cafés of Paris, but in the vineyards of France.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a tiny aphid known as phylloxera arrived in Europe from North America. Almost invisible to the eye, it proved devastating to grapevines. By the 1860s and 1870s, it had begun destroying vineyards across France.

Entire regions lost their vines. Wine production collapsed.

The era is now known as the Great French Wine Blight.

For generations, wine had been the foundation of French drinking culture. It was consumed daily and woven into both rural and urban life. But as the crisis deepened, wine became scarce and expensive.

The effects reached far beyond wine drinkers.

Traditionally, Absinthe was made using grape-based alcohol, essentially distilled wine or brandy, much like other European spirits of the time. But when vineyards failed, that supply collapsed as well.

Distillers turned to other sources of neutral alcohol: sugar beets, grain, and industrial spirits. The shift made production cheaper. It also made scale possible.

Many producers continued to make high-quality Absinthe using careful distillation and natural botanicals, but the expanding market also attracted less scrupulous manufacturers.

Some produced inexpensive imitations using artificial coloring or poorly distilled alcohol. These versions could taste harsh, unbalanced, even unpleasant.

Critics seized on them and pointed to these lower-quality products as evidence that Absinthe itself was dangerous.

The reality was more complicated.

What people were reacting to was not the traditional spirit enjoyed in cafés and studios, but the growing presence of cheaply manufactured versions that emerged during a period of rapid industrial expansion.

At the same time, drinkers were adapting to a new landscape. Wine was scarce. Other drinks filled the gap, including Absinthe.

Distilled from neutral spirits and flavored with botanicals, including the “holy trinity” of wormwood, anise, and fennel, Absinthe had already been growing in popularity throughout the nineteenth century. During the wine shortage, its consumption expanded rapidly because it was affordable and widely available. It became associated with the rituals of modern urban life. By the 1880s and 1890s, the drink was everywhere.

Writers and painters gathered around it. Workers ordered it after long days in factories and workshops. The hour before dinner even acquired a name: l’heure verte, the Green Hour, the closest nineteenth-century equivalent to today’s happy hour.

Absinthe had become visible, and visibility attracts blame. By the time French vineyards began to recover, the wine industry faced an unexpected problem: consumers had changed their habits.

Absinthe and other spirits had taken a share of the market that wine once dominated.

For producers trying to rebuild after years of devastation, this was no minor inconvenience. It was a threat.

Campaigns soon emerged warning of what newspapers called le péril vert, the Green Peril. Articles described Absinthe as a toxic drink corrupting the nation’s health. Illustrations showed skeletal drinkers collapsing in delirium, families destroyed by the bottle. The message was repeated again and again:

Absinthe was no longer just a drink. It was a danger.

These fears landed in a country already shaken by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. Concerns about national strength, military readiness, and social degeneration were everywhere.

Absinthe became a convenient symbol for all of it. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Green Fairy had been transformed. Once associated with creativity and café culture, she was now cast as a figure of decline.

The story had changed. And once a story takes hold, it can be very difficult to undo.

Absinthe wasn’t banned because it was dangerous. It was banned because it was visible and was easy to blame.

But the story didn’t end with the ban. It evolved.

In the next piece, we’ll take on the myth that refused to die: that Absinthe makes you hallucinate, and why that idea was never really about science at all.

I remember the first time I stood in front of the real paintings.

Not reproductions. Not images in a book.

The actual Degas. The Manet.

I had seen them before, but seeing them in person is different. The scale shifts. The texture comes into focus. The room feels quieter.

It was a rainy afternoon in Manhattan in October 2023. I had planned the trip around this exhibit, working with my distributors so I could see it.

That morning as I headed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I felt fine.

On the bus ride back to my hotel, I fell asleep. That afternoon, I tested positive for Covid.

Looking back, it feels like my mind had already slipped slightly out of alignment. The edges had softened just enough for the realization to come through.

That was the moment something shifted.

Degas: expectation and reality

Degas’s L’Absinthe is often described as a portrait of decline.

A woman and a man sit at a café table. A glass of absinthe in front of her. For decades, the painting has been treated as visual proof of the drink’s supposed effects. Isolation. Melancholy. Disintegration.

But standing in front of it, that is not what I saw.

Nothing is exaggerated. Nothing is theatrical.

They are not collapsing.

They are simply not connected.

Sitting side by side, entirely separate.

It feels less like a warning and more like an observation.

Manet: stripping away the myth

Manet’s drinker holds a similar stillness.

No chaos. No distortion. No hint of madness.

Just a person. A drink. A moment.

Again, it does not match what I had been told Absinthe was.

The fracture

That was the first crack in the story.

For years, Absinthe had been framed as dangerous. Excessive. Something that altered the mind in dramatic ways.

But the artists who lived alongside it, who painted it, who included it in their work, were showing something else.

Something quieter. More human. More real.

The bookstore moment

I left the gallery and wandered into the museum bookstore.

Somewhere between the art books and the exhibition catalogs, it came together.

If the paintings did not match the myth, then the myth was not the truth.

The story had been shaped. Simplified. Rewritten.

And if that was true, then Absinthe was not just a drink with a misunderstood past.

It was part of something larger. A cultural narrative moving through art, politics, industry, and imagination.

That was the moment everything shifted.

Not when I first tasted Absinthe, not when I began making it, but when I realized the story surrounding it did not hold up under closer attention.

That realization became the foundation for the work I am doing now.

The Green Fairy’s Canvas is not just about Absinthe as a spirit.

It is about Absinthe as a subject. How it moved through art. How it became myth. How those myths still shape the way we see it.

Because sometimes the truth is not hidden. It is hanging on a wall, in plain sight. You just have to look closely enough to see it.

That was the moment I realized there was a different story to tell.

And that I wanted to be the one to tell it.

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I was curious. Then I was captivated.

Absinthe sits at the intersection of things I’ve always been drawn to: art, history, ritual, and myth. It carries with it a story that is both beautiful and deeply distorted.

Artists painted it. Writers mythologized it. Governments banned it.

And somewhere along the way, the truth got lost. That was the part I couldn’t let go of.

The more I learned, the clearer it became that Absinthe wasn’t just a drink. It was a cultural artifact. A symbol. A narrative that had been rewritten over and over again.

So I kept going.

What started as curiosity became study.
Study became obsession.
And eventually, that obsession became a business.

And now, a book.

I’m writing The Green Fairy’s Canvas to explore the full story of Absinthe, its influence on art, its mythology, its science, and the long path it took from medicine to scandal to revival.

But if I’m being honest, this didn’t begin as a project.

It began as something much simpler.

I fell in love with it. The color, the ritual, the forgotten women who first created it. And, of course, the fact that there was a Prohibition against it.

And sometimes I wonder if that’s how the most meaningful work begins, not as a plan, but as something that quietly takes hold and refuses to let go.

If you’ve been following along here, you’re already part of that story.

And I’m curious, what’s something you didn’t plan to build your life around, but did anyway?

By the time the Absinthe ban began, it was one of many widely consumed alcoholic drinks. Wine, beer, and spirits were all part of daily life. Yet, Absinthe became the one singled out.

To understand why, you have to look at the moment in which Absinthe rose. In the mid-nineteenth century, European vineyards were devastated by phylloxera, a tiny insect that destroyed grapevines across France. Wine production collapsed. For a culture built around wine, this was not a minor disruption.

It was a crisis.

As wine became scarce and expensive, people adapted. They drank what was available. Absinthe, already growing in popularity, became one of the most visible alternatives.

The shift in production

At the same time, Absinthe itself was changing.

Traditionally made with grape-based spirits, it began to be produced with cheaper sources of alcohol as vineyards failed.

This made it more accessible.

It also meant quality varied widely.

Reputable producers continued to distill carefully.

Others did not.

Lower-quality versions entered the market, and those versions were easier to criticize.

Visibility and blame

By the late nineteenth century, Absinthe was everywhere. In cafés, in working-class neighborhoods, in artistic circles. She was visible. And visibility makes something easier to blame.

For a recovering wine industry, this mattered. Consumers had adapted.

Absinthe had taken a place that wine once held.

The narrative forms

Campaigns began to take shape. Absinthe was framed not just as a drink, but as a threat. Newspapers described it as toxic. Illustrations depicted drinkers in states of collapse. The phrase le péril vert, the Green Peril, began to circulate.

The message was clear.

Absinthe was not just harmful. It was responsible.

Why this worked

The narrative succeeded because it simplified a complex situation.

Industrialization, changing drinking habits, economic disruption, and public health concerns were all real.

But they were harder to explain.

Absinthe was easier. It had a color. A ritual. A name. It could be turned into a symbol. Absinthe did not need to be uniquely dangerous to be banned. It only needed to be believable as the cause.

Once that belief took hold, it reshaped how the drink was seen, discussed, and ultimately regulated.

The ban was not the result of a single truth.

It was the result of a story that people were ready to accept.

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For more than a century, Absinthe has carried a reputation unlike any other drink. Stories from the Temperance movement, the French wine industry, and the French church claim it causes hallucinations, madness, and visions of the Green Fairy.

The truth is much less dramatic.

Absinthe does not make people hallucinate. It never did.

The myth began in the late nineteenth century, when the drink had become enormously popular across France and much of Europe. During the daily ritual of l’heure verte, the Green Hour before dinner, cafés filled with people slowly preparing glasses of Absinthe.

At the same time, the French wine industry was struggling.

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