It’s an unspoken writer’s rule, when writing about “the green fairy,” that I make some kind of reference to its historic notoriety; how it was the liquid love and alchemical bane of countless artists and Bohemians around the turn of the 19th century; and how much of the Western world banned it because of suspicions that it caused people to go absolutely bonkers.
Then I’d be obliged to briefly discuss how all those fears were unfounded—the beverage and its chemical constituents were unfairly maligned—and yet there exists a mystique about the emerald tipple even today, nearly two decades after its re-legalization.
Sorry. I’m not going to go into any of that. There are writers far better than me who have tackled those topics. What I want to talk about is simply how to make the stuff.