Spirit of the night

5 PM There is a correct way to drink absinthe, and it has a certain sense of theatre. On a quiet afternoon at Barcelona’s Bar Marsella, the landlord José Lamiel Vallvé is demonstrating the time-honoured tradition. For this, he requires: one glass of neat absinthe, a short silver fork, a pair of sugar cubes and a plastic bottle of water with - and this is the important part - a pin prick in the lid of the bottle. First, José balances the fork on the top of the glass of absinthe and places the sugar cubes into the cradle. Then, taking the water bottle, he squeezes a narrow jet very slowly over the sugar cubes. Keeping my eyes on the yellowy-green liquid, I see the magic start to happen. Ghostly tendrils appear, filling the glass until the liquid has become a misty emulsion. This is known, appropriately, as the ‘louche effect’.

Absinthe has been drunk this way for at least a century. In 1922, while working, Ernest Hemingway wrote of watching absinthe turn “milky when water was added” and noted how the resulting drink had “the slow, culminating wallop that made the boulevardier want to get up and jump on his new straw hat in ecstasy.”