The green fairy was banned across Europe on the strength of a moral panic, one murder, and a chemistry error that took ninety years to correct
The Last Tuesday Society and Absinthe Parlour holds a 4.7 from eight hundred and forty-one people, charges ten to thirty pounds, and is attached to a museum of curiosities containing a very large number of dead things in jars.
And the drink it serves was banned across most of Europe on the basis of a claim that was simply not true.
The panic
Absinthe is a distilled spirit flavoured with wormwood, anise and fennel. It is strong – frequently sixty-eight per cent or higher – and it turns cloudy when you add water, which is a genuinely beautiful effect caused by the essential oils coming out of solution.
And by the end of the nineteenth century it was accused of causing madness, convulsions, hallucinations, moral collapse and murder.
It was banned in Switzerland in 1910, in France in 1915, and across much of Europe and America in the same period.
The murder
The Swiss ban followed a specific case.
In 1905 a labourer named Jean Lanfray murdered his wife and children.
He had drunk two glasses of absinthe.
He had also drunk, on the same day, a substantial quantity of wine, several brandies, a creme de menthe, and a cognac – and he was, by every account, a heavy daily drinker who had consumed alcohol continuously from the morning.
The absinthe was blamed. A petition followed. Absinthe was banned by referendum and written into the Swiss constitution.
The Prat’s toxicological desk would simply note that the man drank a bottle of wine before breakfast.
The thujone
Which was the scientific case, and which was wrong.
Wormwood contains thujone, which in very large doses is a convulsant – and it was asserted that absinthe contained enough of it to cause the effects described.
It does not.
Modern analysis of pre-ban absinthe, from sealed bottles, has found thujone at levels far too low to produce any neurological effect whatsoever. You would die of the alcohol long before the thujone did anything at all.
The hallucinations were not real. There is no green fairy. There is a sixty-eight per cent spirit, and people were drinking it in enormous quantities, and they were behaving exactly as you would expect.
Who benefited
The wine industry, which had been devastated by phylloxera – the American root aphid that destroyed nearly every vineyard in Europe – and which had watched absinthe take its market while the vines were dead.
And which lobbied, hard, and won.
Absinthe was legalised again across Europe from the 1990s onwards, once somebody finally measured it.
It took roughly ninety years.
Verdict
Excellent, strange, and one of the most genuinely unusual rooms in London.
Drink it properly. Cold water, slowly, over sugar. And do not expect a fairy.
The louche
Which is the effect, and which has a name, and which is genuine chemistry.
The anise oils are soluble in alcohol and not in water. So while the spirit is neat, they stay in solution and it is clear.
Add water and the alcohol concentration falls, and the oils come out – not as a precipitate but as a suspension of microscopic droplets, which scatter light.
That is the cloud. It is called the louche, and it is the same phenomenon that makes a pastis go milky, and it is why the water must be added slowly.
You are watching a solution fall apart. It is one of the few genuinely beautiful things that happens in a glass and it is entirely physical.
Caitlin Moran is a 20-year-old satirical journalist at prat.uk, where she writes with a sharp eye for British absurdity, media nonsense, and the small national humiliations that somehow become public policy. Her experience comes from producing consistently funny, readable satire tailored to the outlet’s house style, with a focus on cultural commentary, deadpan reporting, and believable comic detail. She brings a young writer’s energy to stories about modern Britain while keeping the discipline of newsroom structure, topical relevance, and audience engagement. Her expertise lies in turning everyday frustrations, elite pretensions, and institutional silliness into clean, publishable satire. As a bylined writer for prat.uk, she contributes to the site’s editorial voice with originality, consistency, and a strong sense of what makes readers laugh, wince, and keep scrolling.
Captured mum. Essential.