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THE SCIENTIST Ted Breaux is a New Orleans native whose day job is in environmental chemistry, but the crowd at Tales of the Cocktail knows him as “the absinthe guy.” During his school days, Breaux worked nights as a bartender. “It allowed me to see spirits from the scientific and the artistic side,” he says. In the early 1990s, Breaux developed a deep interest in absinthe, which had been much mythologized, but his investigations didn’t get far. (The production of genuine absinthe has been obscured by a century of misunderstanding and legal hurdles.) “The only way I’m going to be able to explore this is to make it,” Breaux recalls thinking. No mainstream distiller could help with his experiments – none had the expertise. So he brought his scientific training to bear. “I was forced into distology. It set me off on an odyssey.” Since then, Breaux has gained notoriety for his efforts to reverse-engineer authentic, 19th-century absinthe from belle époque samples. The resulting spirits, sold under the Jade Liqueurs label, are sought the world over. But his mad science didn’t stop there. For the past several years Breaux has been perfecting Perique, a craft liqueur distilled in infinitesimal quantities from a near-extinct Louisiana tobacco. A glass of the tawny liquid smells like a cigar box, cedar spice and tea leaves, and tastes of cognac, orange peel and brine. It could never have been produced by a large commercial distiller: a pleasantly mouth-numbing expression of one man’s personality. |
