I just created a flickr group that focuses on pictures of beers from around the world. My buddies and I have a habit of taking cell phone snaps of our drinks and sending them to each other, It kinda gets you in the mood if your buddy send yous a nice margarita at noon and gives you something to look forward to when you leave work.
If you want to join my group head on over to Beers around the World and feel free to contribute.
I’m nearly recovered from my trip to Europe and hopefully will have some time in the next week or so to post some photos but I wanted to write about an experience we had in Prague with Absinthe and the dangers that can happen if not done right. We decided to do one of those pub crawl tours which takes you around to a few various pubs and explains the history of Prague and the beer. At the end of one such tour and probably 6-7 beers into our adventure my travel partner wanted to try out Absinthe.
“Absinthe or the Green Fairy as many call it is a is a distilled, highly alcoholic, anise-flavored spirit derived from herbs including the flowers and leaves of the medicinal plant Artemisia absinthium, also called grand wormwood. Although it is sometimes mistakenly called a liqueur, absinthe is not bottled with added sugar and is, therefore, classified as a liquor or spirit.”
This drink is prepared in a special way (my guess is cause it tastes like crap with out it) where you use a spoon, sugar, some water and fire. Now this seems like a good idea and everyone loves to play with fire but add an additional 6-7 beers before hand and things can get out of control quickly which happened in our case. (their seems to be many ways to prepare Absinthe)
My travel partner (I wont mention names) asked the bartender to work his magic and prepare this drink for him, unfortunately he didn’t speak any English so our young tour guide did a bit of translation as to what he was doing. From what I remember he put some sugar on the spoon, poured some absinthe on the spoon, lit the sugar on the spoon to allow it to caramelized and then dumped the sugar into the glass which lit the whole glass ablaze. The tour guide said something to the effect of drink or blow, I don’t remember now, it happened so fast and my buddy tried to drink the whole glass of Absinthe while it was still on fire and spilling a bit on his face. As you can imagine the group gasped in horror as we saw my buddy face go up in flames.
Here is a quote from my buddy on what happened:
“The actual confusion was that he mimed blowing out the glass, but it looked like taking a drink, so I said “chug it?” and he said “yes, chug it”, thinking that chug meant blow out or something. My fault for using vernacular.”
After what seemed to be like 10 seconds someone finally patted his face down putting out the fire, and the looks of horror and amazement where plastered on the groups faces. After checking with my buddy to make sure he was all right, we all burst into laughter but still a bit socked as to what just happened. I guess the tour guide didn’t really translate that he needs to blow out the glass before he takes the drink. I guess this is common sense to anyone who hasn’t been already drinking or thought that this was the way to do it. So this is just a word of warning to all wanting to do Absinthe blow out the freaking fire before taking a sip 
My buddy is all fine, he had a nice case of 2nd degree burns on one side of his face and is healing fine, poor guy. He still claims that he could of drank the whole thing while it was on fire, I guess we will never know unless we head back to Prague some time soon.
