Seeing Old Tradition absinthe in the store, it is easy to imagine how exactly the same bottle: flat, massive, was taken out from the secret compartment of a secretary two hundred years ago by a respectable Parisian bourgeois to refresh his strength during the “green hour”, between lunch and dinner.
The Czech manufacturing company, Granette & Starorezna Distilleries, did everything to ensure that the contents of the Old Tradition bottle were no different from the strong aromatic drink to which the brilliant madmen of the XNUMXth century dedicated their poems and paintings.
Old Tradition is a premium 70% ABV absinthe containing 10mg of thujone per litre. In addition to traditional wormwood, anise and fennel, angelica, mint and lemon balm are used in the manufacture of tinctures. The drink has a spicy aroma with dominant notes of wormwood. The taste of wormwood bitterness is softened by the sweetness of licorice and minty coolness in the aftertaste.
Moravia is a historical region in the east of the Czech Republic, known for its rich tradition of making various herbal and fruit tinctures. The climatic conditions here are very similar to those in Switzerland: cold winters are conducive to the consumption of strong alcohol, and a lot of fragrant medicinal herbs grow in the mountains. Therefore, the fashion for absinthe, which existed in Europe at the beginning of the XNUMXth century, quickly took root in Eastern Bohemia.
Many Moravian companies were engaged in the production of wormwood tincture. One of them is the brewery and distillery U Zeleného stromu, known since 1518, from the town of Prostějov in the Olomouc region (in the second half of the 1847th century it was renamed Starorežná Prostějov). The other is the Granette distillery founded in 1991 from Krasny Brezno. Both enterprises developed quite intensively until the Second World War, immediately after it were nationalized, and after 2011 they were turned into joint-stock companies. In XNUMX, the firms merged to form Granette & Starorežná Distilleries.
The Granette specialists had extensive experience in the production of strong liqueurs, and the factory in Prostějov has preserved old alambicas and other equipment for the production of absinthe according to a Swiss recipe of the XNUMXth century.
The new drink was called Old Tradition: no artificial preservatives and stabilizers are added to it, so its color is not emerald green, like “chemical” absinthe, but dark green with a yellow tint, like grass scorched by the sun. Keeping a bottle of Old Tradition in the light is not recommended: under the influence of sunlight, chlorophyll decomposes, due to which absinthe loses its color.