A New York company and a New Orleans scientist.

Lucid Absinthe Supérieure was created by T. A. Breaux, the New Orleans-born scientist behind the French absinthe house Jade Liqueurs, for Viridian Spirits, LLC of New York. Lucid’s website today says the spirit “was created by world-renowned research scientist and absinthe distiller T.A. Breaux of Jade Liqueurs.” English Wikipedia says it was produced for Viridian Spirits before the brand was sold in 2013.

The brand was conceived for one market. Absinthe had been banned in the United States in 1912, English Wikipedia’s article on absinthe says, and from 2007 the federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau began approving labels for it again. According to English Wikipedia’s Lucid article, which cites the bureau’s own label record, Lucid’s certificate of label approval was granted on 5 March 2007. Jade Liqueurs’ website credits “the efforts of T. A. Breaux and Viridian Spirits” with the lifting of what it calls the 95-year ban on that date, and English Wikipedia says the Lucid and Kübler brands and their lawyers did much of the work toward legal sale between 2004 and 2007.

Shanken News Daily reported in March 2013 that the brand “launched in 2007.” Lucid describes itself as “the first genuine absinthe distilled with real grande wormwood to be legally available in the United States after a 95-year ban”; we give that as the company’s claim.

Made in the Loire.

Lucid is made in France. Shanken News Daily reported in 2013 that it is “produced at the Combier Distillery in Saumur, France,” the same distillery Jade Liqueurs uses. Lucid’s website says it is “hand-crafted in strict accordance with traditional European methods in the historic Combier Distillery of the Loire Valley of France,” and adds that the distillery was designed by Gustave Eiffel in the 1880s and that its copper pot stills began making absinthe almost 150 years ago. Jade’s own website dates Eiffel’s redesign of the distillery to 1894, and English Wikipedia gives the distillery’s founding as 1834; we give those as the sources’ statements.

The recipe, by the company’s account, rests on three plants named on its website and in English Wikipedia: grande wormwood, Artemisia absinthium, with fennel and anise. Lucid says it is “distilled exclusively from whole European herbs” and contains no added flavours or dyes. It is bottled at 62% alcohol, or 124 proof, in 750ml and 375ml sizes, according to its website. English Wikipedia notes that the spirit needs a dark bottle because light fades its natural green colour.

Lucid’s website frames the drink through ritual as well as history. It describes “louching,” in which cold water is added, often over a sugar cube, turning the green spirit cloudy, and it publishes a mixology guide and cocktail recipes alongside a video in which Breaux talks about the legalisation in 2007.

Its tasting language is precise in the same way. The company describes “upfront flavors of anise and fennel, followed by mild mid-palate earthy textures attributable to grand wormwood” and colouring botanicals, with spice and grassy notes in a moderately long finish. Its website is short and simple, organised into five sections — about, cocktails, the Combier distillery, the tasting room and where to buy — and its footer gives the strength as 62% alcohol by volume beside Hood River Distillers’ name and the line “Stay in Control.”

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.

From New York to Hood River.

In March 2013 the brand changed hands. Shanken News Daily reported on 20 March 2013 that Hood River Distillers, of Oregon, had acquired Lucid Absinthe Supérieure from New York’s Viridian Spirits; English Wikipedia also gives 2013, citing Drinkhacker. Hood River Distillers has owned Lucid since 2013. In a 2024 interview with Chilled magazine, the company’s president and chief executive, David Ballew, said Hood River was founded in 1934, months after the end of Prohibition, and that it “still works closely with the creator and founder of Lucid, T.A. (Ted) Breaux.”

Lucid now sits in an American portfolio while being made in France. Its website carries a copyright line in the name of Hood River Distillers, Inc., of Hood River, Oregon, and directs visitors to the company’s tasting room in the town. The same owner bought the Portland eau-de-vie maker Clear Creek Distillery in 2014, so Lucid’s stablemates are Oregon spirits.

Its identity has also been shaped by regulation. English Wikipedia’s article on absinthe notes that US labelling rules do not allow the word “absinthe” to stand alone as the brand name. Lucid’s full name pairs a brand name, Lucid, with the category description Absinthe Supérieure.

For a design guide, Lucid shows a brand whose identity is tied to a regulatory moment and a historic distillery. Compare Jade Liqueurs, Breaux’s own house at the same distillery, and St. George Spirits, the California distillery that released an American-made absinthe in 2007. For this guide we use black, a deep verte and a wormwood green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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