Four Englishmen, a Czech import and a French historian.

La Fée grew out of a small English import business. In its March–April 2001 issue, Cigar Aficionado reported that in 1998 John Moore joined George Rowley, of the drinks importer Bohemia Beer House, with Gavin Pretor-Pinney and Tom Hodgkinson to found a company called Green Bohemia, which imported a Czech absinth sold as Hill’s. The company’s own history, written by Rowley, places the work at a base in Bayford, Hertfordshire, and says the import contract with the Czech producer was signed on 9 November 1998.

The same group then set out to make a French-style absinthe. Cigar Aficionado reported that they formed a new company, Green Utopia Ltd, and turned for the recipe to Marie-Claude Delahaye, a cellular biologist turned absinthe historian who had opened an absinthe museum at Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris, in 1994. The magazine said production had begun the previous summer, at a French pastis company that asked not to be named, and that the drink could then be made in France only for export, since the 1915 French ban on its sale still stood.

La Fée’s own account names the distiller as Christian Camax of a Paris pastis distillery, and says Rowley first wrote to Delahaye with a partnership proposal on 26 May 1999. English Wikipedia dates the first distillation of La Fée Parisienne to July 2000 and describes Delahaye as a director of La Fée LLP; the company dates it to May 2000.

A green verte, a clear blanche and a Czech-style bottling.

The range widened through the 2000s. English Wikipedia lists the Parisienne, a green absinthe supérieure bottled at 68 per cent, whose recipe it says was refined in 2013 and relaunched in bottles with UV protection; the Blanche, a clear absinthe first distilled in 2011; and La Fée Bohemian, a low-anise style it says was first produced south of Prague in November 2004 and is now made in France. Wikipedia names the Cherry Rocher distillery at La Côte-Saint-André, in Isère, as the maker of the Parisienne and Blanche; the company says the old stills used for both belong to a distillery dating from 1705, and that the finished spirit is bottled in Paris.

Two higher-strength bottlings followed in 2007, according to Wikipedia. The company says X•S Française is distilled at Pontarlier, in the Doubs, on stills bought second-hand in 1870, and that X•S Suisse is distilled at Couvet, in Switzerland’s Val-de-Travers, from a wine-alcohol base. Switzerland’s 1910 ban had been lifted with effect from 1 March 2005, swissinfo.ch reported that year.

The newest line, NV Absinthe Verte, is bottled at 38 per cent. The company says the name comes from “envy,” the green-eyed sin, and that NV carries the same eye emblem as the Parisienne. In June 2026 the La Fée website reported taking its NV bus to a student festival at Keele University.

The brand has also defended its claim to the word itself. La Fée says that from late 2009 it opposed a Swiss application to reserve the name absinthe for spirit distilled in the Val-de-Travers, arguing that this would cut out the drink’s French history. swissinfo.ch reported in July 2010 that the application, filed with the Federal Office for Agriculture, had drawn objections from France and Germany.

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.

One stylised eye, registered as a mark.

La Fée’s identity rests on a single device: a stylised eye. The company calls it the La Fée Eye, describes it as the emblem of the whole range, and says that the fairy of the name can be found within it. It says it filed the eye as a trademark in the United States on 6 August 2003, while absinthe was still barred from sale there, and that the registration was granted in 2006. A UK retail listing for the brand states that the eye and the La Fée name are registered trademarks of La Fée LLP in the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union.

The company also uses the eye in pairs. A caption on its website shows the Parisienne and the Bohemian side by side, one bottle carrying a left eye and the other a right, and the company says the eye is meant to stand out on a back bar. Its early marketing leaned on a different image: the company says it commissioned drawings of a modern “sugar and burn” serve from the artist Xtina Lamb in the Green Bohemia years, and states plainly that this ritual is a contemporary invention, not the French method of dripping iced water over sugar. A photograph on its site shows a bus in La Fée livery around 2000.

Behind the brand stand two English companies. The La Fée website is published by Bohemia Beer House Ltd of Bayford, Hertfordshire, and names La Fée LLP and BBH Spirits Ltd as the vehicles for its absinthe work; Wikipedia says Green Utopia is owned and run by George Rowley.

For a design guide, La Fée shows how one simple, ownable mark can hold together a range made in several places. Compare Pernod, whose absinthe story also runs through Pontarlier, where La Fée’s X•S Française is distilled, and Kübler, from the Val-de-Travers. For this guide we use absinthe green, cream and near-black with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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