Evan Rail is normally a beer guy. Evan lives in the Czech Republic, which of course is famous for its beer, for its pilsners.

But sometime in the late 90s, Evan got interested in this new drink, not beer, this spirit that had suddenly appeared on the Czech scene and was taking it by storm.

And in fact, the new drink wasn't new at all.

It was the reappearance of a very old drink.

It was absent.

Basically a licoricey, minty, herbal spirit with a lot of wonderfully aromatic and fragrant spice notes or herbal notes

that's really refreshing. And it's generally green, although not necessarily green in color.

And when you add water to it, it turns cloudy. Absinth had a big reputation. Absent had been banned in Europe for

almost 100 years. And people associated it with the fringes of society, with counterculture artists

and bad behavior and even violence. But Absinth was coming back big time. I'd actually written an article about the

Absent Trail in Switzerland and France and how these distillers were re-emerging. Their drink

had been legalized after 95 years, roughly a full century.

What Evan learned while writing that article was that Absinth can inspire some pretty intense admiration. He met people who were collectors, who dropped serious cash on Absinth memorabilia,

things like posters, glasses, even old bottles of absence from before the band.

To be honest, though, Evan himself wasn't that much of a convert.

It's not really my favorite drink in general. I'm curious about all kinds of drinks, but I'd sort of left absence behind.

Or at least, that's what he thought.

Years later, in 2019, Evan got a Facebook message from an absent expert that he had met

while writing that article.

It turns out that one of his friends, one of their colleagues, had been selling forgeries.

He was selling what was supposed to be historic absent from before the ban. But he had been

selling fake bottles, they said, to other collectors and effectively just ripping them off.

...