A family recipe, a ban and a syrup business.

Kübler is a family name that outlasted a prohibition. The Kübler family distilled absinthe in Switzerland’s Val-de-Travers, in the canton of Neuchâtel, from 1863, according to the company. swissinfo.ch reported in 2005 that Yves Kübler’s great-grandfather was making absinthe that year under the name Kübler & Romang, and selling it across Europe. English Wikipedia names the founder as J. Fritz Kübler; the company calls him Frédéric Emile Kübler, known as Fritz I, and credits a Jacob Frédéric Kübler with a green absinthe recipe of 1875.

Switzerland banned absinthe from 7 October 1910. After the ban the family business made only syrups, swissinfo.ch reported, and in 1962 it was sold because the younger generation was not interested. The company says the mint syrup that gives the distillery its name, Blackmint, has been made to the same recipe since 1935.

In 1990 Yves Kübler — the company calls him the grandson of Fritz II and great-grandson of Fritz I — bought the firm back, re-equipped it and named it Blackmint, swissinfo.ch reported. The company says he took it over with a childhood friend, Alexandre Wyss, at a time when it made only syrups; its first new product was La Rincette, an anise aperitif. Speaking to swissinfo.ch in 2010, he credited his mother with passing the passion on to him.

From a cantonal extract to a legal Swiss absinthe.

The revival came in stages. The company says that on 10 October 2001 — 91 years and three days after the ban — Yves Kübler produced an absinthe extract that complied with Swiss law as it then stood. In January 2002 swissinfo.ch described it: sold as Extrait d’Absinthe, held by law to 45 per cent alcohol, made with nine herbs but less wormwood than before. “It’s real absinthe, but the law prevents us from saying it’s absinthe,” Kübler told the site, adding that he saw it as a niche export for markets such as Britain, the United States and Germany. swissinfo.ch reported in 2005 that he had obtained authorisation from the canton of Neuchâtel for the extract about eleven years after taking over the business, and that absinthe’s production and sale became fully legal in Switzerland on 1 March 2005. A company history recalls the copper still at Môtiers, which it says was beaten in 1992 by a coppersmith at Markdorf, on Lake Constance.

The 2005 report described the drink as clear, without sugar or colouring, and bottled by hand, and said the Val-de-Travers producers were seeking a protected designation of origin. The company calls its main absinthe Kübler l’Originale and says it is made only in the Val-de-Travers, with grand wormwood grown in the valley. It also sells a coloured Verte Suisse, which it traces to the 1875 recipe.

The United States followed. swissinfo.ch reported in October 2007 that federal authorities had approved Kübler’s formula in 2004 and its label in May 2007. The importer, Altamar Brands, owned by Lyons Brown, launched it that October in New York, Boston and Las Vegas, with San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago and Miami to follow. A 2013 Darden School of Business teaching case, written by Marian Chapman Moore and Brooke Correll, takes the May 2007 Altamar contract as its starting point, asking how fast to expand after launches in five major markets.

Kübler also took part in the valley’s fight over the name. In July 2010 swissinfo.ch reported that the Val-de-Travers producers’ association had asked the Federal Office for Agriculture to reserve the names “Absinthe,” “Fée verte” and “La Bleue” for spirit distilled in the valley, and that objections had come from France and Germany, including from Pernod Ricard. Yves Kübler told the site that some producers elsewhere used essential oils instead of distilling plants.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all absinthe names: La Fée, Kübler, Jade, Lucid, Émile Pernot, Duplais and Vieux Pontarlier. Between them they run from a Pontarlier distillery that says it first labelled absinthe in 1889 to names launched after the drink became legal again.

Two places sit behind most absinthe stories. One is the Val-de-Travers, a valley in the Swiss canton of Neuchâtel: English Wikipedia records that Major Dubied opened a distillery at Couvet in 1797, and that the village of Môtiers in the Val-de-Travers became a focal point of production after the Swiss ban was lifted. The other is Pontarlier, just across the border in the French department of the Doubs, where the same source records that the Pernod family built a distillery under the name Maison Pernod Fils in 1805.

The bans shaped every brand here. English Wikipedia records that Switzerland held a referendum on 5 July 1908 and that the production and sale of absinthe were prohibited there from 1910 until 1 March 2005. In France, Parliament voted the law banning absinthe production on 16 March 1915, according to the Pontarlier distillery Les Fils d’Émile Pernot; English Wikipedia records that the French ban of 1915 was repealed in May 2011, and that in the United States the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau effectively lifted its long-standing ban in 2007.

A label is therefore often doing more than naming a drink: it is placing it in one of these two places, or in the years before or after a ban. Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the brand, who owns it now, where its absinthe is actually distilled and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family name as the brand.

Kübler’s identity is built on the family name and the valley. The company presents the absinthe as “Kübler Absinthe,” and its own description of the drink uses the old Swiss nicknames, the green fairy and “la Bleue,” for a spirit that is clear in the bottle. Its website opens with the founding year of 1863, the date of the 1910 ban and Yves Kübler’s descent from the brand’s founder. That history sits in a crowded valley: swissinfo.ch reported in 2002 that the Val-de-Travers had about a dozen absinthe factories by the turn of the twentieth century, and that locals still called the drink “the Blue.”

Today the absinthe is made by Blackmint SA, which the company also styles Kübler & Wyss, at Môtiers. Its website lists a wider range alongside the absinthes: La Rincette, a fondue kirsch, a Pontarlier-style anise, a Kübler Swiss Dry Gin that it says began as a project for a customer in Asia, and syrups. It lists importers in countries including China, Germany, Japan, Finland, the Netherlands, the United States, Canada and Costa Rica.

For a design guide, Kübler shows how a surname, a place and a date can carry a brand without a pictorial mark. Compare La Fée, whose X•S Suisse is also distilled in the Val-de-Travers, and Pernod, from Pontarlier across the French border. For this guide we use a pale blue, clear glass and a night-blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Kübler’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.