Strangely, the Michigan Absinthe I Bought About a Year Ago Just Made Me Throw Up a Little in My Mouth
From a New York Times story about Cheryl Lins, who makes absinthe upstate north of NYC and trucks it down to hip stores in Fun City:
After the Delaware County floods in 2006, grants and loans for new businesses were easier to come by and Ms. Lins saw an opportunity. Playing lawyer, she navigated the paper push of federal licensing and labeling. New York State bureaucracy was another matter. She said that by January 2009, she had not heard a word about the application she filed the previous September. Not prone to tears, she remembers them streaming onto her keyboard as she sent a pleading e-mail message to Albany.
"All I wanted was a chance to fail or succeed on my own merits, not because they were holding me up," she said. Her state license arrived two weeks later; her first commercial batch of Delaware Phoenix absinthe was out in April.
Whole thing here. I'm not sure what, if anything, to do with the above paragraphs, in which Ms. Lins gets grants and loans from (I assume) state and federal sources and then gets screwed around by bureaucrats. I do know that I greatly enjoyed drinking large quantities of absinthe in Amsterdan at a Reason event a few years back. And, as my headline suggests, my experience with domestic absinthe has been less than wonderful.
Reason's Jacob Sullum wrote about The Green Fairy here. And Charles Paul Freund poured a glass here.
Hat Tip: Alan Vanneman, World's Greatest Tipster.
Bonus video: Garrett C. Peck. author of the excellent The Prohibition Hangover, tells Reason.tv why American liquor laws are so screwy.
