Color: Very pretty and olive in the bottle with a little bit of swirling "sediment", although it's more like a teensy bit of a dark green dust. In the glass, it's a clear, very pale citrine color.

Louche: I would give half points here if I could (3.5). The Leopold has always louched relatively thin for me, and after being fully diluted will build to a more opaque louche after about 5 or 10 minutes of it resting. There is some translucent layering, and a slight opalescence in color, while maintaining some good green qualities. It should be noted that the thinness of the louche in no way effects the texture of the absinthe. I find most of the time thin louche = watery feel, but this is certainly not the case here.

Aroma: This is packed with nose-tickling anise, a sweet note and some wormwood, a mentholated minty aroma, and something nice and floral that I'm not familiar with. It also has a nice little alcohol-heat kick.

Flavor: Very balanced and nice, a good hint of alcohol flavor (but not at all in a bad way.) Nothing in the flavor is too forward or overpowering, all playing nicely with each other.

Finish: Warm and nice in the back corners of my mouth. It has a tasty licorice finish (like if black licorice cut out the heavy tar flavor and replaced it with freshness and sugar), with a really great freshness from the melissa.

Overall: This review is of a bottle of batch 21 that I just picked up, which means the bottle itself is a little older, as I had a bottle of batch 30 nearly a year ago. As always, I mixed this without sugar, and it becomes nicely balanced a little closer to 4:1, eliminating a little more of the alcohol bite that is present at lower dilutions. It took a week or so after opening and having a glass or two before it really rounded itself out. This is a nice absinthe to have on hand, definitely worth picking up a bottle if possible.