Food & Beverage

People love telling myths about alcohol. I don't know what it is about the stuff, but it's the subject of more tall tales than perhaps any other substance on the planet. Every long-time bartender has some entirely fictional story about how the Margarita was invented by a lovelorn Mexican poet who named it after the woman he could never have, or how Jack Daniels whiskey is the result of an epic Civil War era odyssey that nearly ended in the destruction of the original recipe for bourbon. It's easy to get dragged into these stories, perhaps because we want to believe there's something special about the things we drink. I suppose that's why the lies concocted about absinthe in the late 19th century persist into the modern day. What was once a smear campaign designed to scare people away from The Green Fairy transformed into the granddaddy of all psychedelic legends. It's almost too bad that none of it is true.