Quote:
Originally Posted by Libertine
Actually, no.
A number of distillers did add things like copper sulphate, malachite green and indigo to replicate the color. Also, antimony trichloride was used to replicate the louching effect.
Some symptoms of absinthism (which was more than just eye discoloration) are likely to have resulted partly from those contaminants, but a major part of it was almost certainly simply the effect of alcoholism.
As an aside: absinthe isn't brewed. It's distilled. Though I'm sure you know that.
Using radiators for bootlegging wasn't particularly common around the fin de siecle, both because there was relatively little need to bootleg the (cheap and still-legal) absinthe and because car radiators (the radiators usually used for bootlegging) weren't particularly easy to come by around 1900. Plus, lead poisoning is what's usually associated with using radiators for bootlegging, not copper poisoning.
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I think that a lot of the distillers you refer to are what I'm referring to as bootleggers. i may have presented the term a little too literally, but essentially there were a lot of people making absinthe that had absolutely no idea what they were doing. I consider anyone that doesn't know how to make it properly to be bootleggers, including most of the german and czech companies today.
Legitimate absinthe makers didn't add copper or anything else to make it louche. They didn't even change the color of it; that's more common today than it was then.
The louching affect was a natural one, which is part of what made such an impression on the doctor that stole the recipe from the swiss girls that made it for him.
Absinthism was never a real condition, so the symptoms were whatever the doctor wanted to blame them on. The specs in the eyes were just the easiest physical manifestation to point to.