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Is anyone else shedding tears of joy right now? Mud Puddle Books, which recently published reproductions of five out-of-print cocktail books from the late 1800s and early 1900s, has plans to publish David Embury’s Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, “one of the most literate and enjoyable books written about cocktails,” notes “A Cocktail Book Renaissance, Too,” in this week’s New York Times. Embury’s book has been known to pop up on eBay now and again, attracting bids in the hundreds, even thousands, of dollars. It is spoken of with reverence by anyone who takes the craft of bartending seriously. I’ve never even seen a copy. But soon, it seems, I will be able to buy one at a reasonable price.

Mud Puddle’s first five re-prints (with introductions by modern experts such as Ted Haigh, Robert Hess and David Wondrich) are also worth a look. They are C. F. Lawlor’s The Mixicologist; Barflies and Cocktails, written in the 1920s by Harry McElhone of the famous Harry’s New York Bar in Paris; Harry Johnson’s Bartenders’ Manual and Guide for Hotels and Restaurants; O. H. Byron’s The Modern Bartender’s Guide; and Recipes of American and Other Iced Drinks, a British book published by Farrow & Jackson to promote its barware.

A shout-out to Wade Tonkin and Karen Garcia of the West Coast culinary blog UltimateFoodie.com. They are coming to Boston for a trade show in a couple of weeks and figured that the best way to get psyched up for the visit was to interview locals who know where to eat and drink. They tasked me with recommending bars near the Seaport Hotel and the World Trade Center, where the trade show’s taking place. A somewhat tough assignment, given that that neighborhood still has a ways to go before it can be described as bustling, but I did my best. I also got to recommend some great beer bars and the stellar Eastern Standard.

By Scott N. Howe

Like you, turning 21 was a big deal for me. It was big because I was finally an adult, and, as such, I could enjoy the most awesome right, privilege and responsibility available to an adult: I could walk into a proper bar and order a proper drink.

This is not to say that there was anything especially “adult” about me at age 21. Nor is it to say that the places I frequented were in any way proper, or that I was ordering proper drinks. Still, I had officially passed from the world of drinking warm cans of whatever in the woods to a wider world, a world where I could walk into the neighborhood watering hole with my head held high, grab a stool next to a 50-something plumber, and down a cold Busch while watching a ball game. Or, I could plop down in a shiny fern bar and sling back frozen mudslides with secretaries and salesmen (Note: I turned 21 in the 1980s. Substitute your own silly drinks.)

Did I always drink like an adult when I turned 21? Of course not. But I could, and that felt good.

And what felt most good was the “adultness” of it all. Drinking legally meant that I could go to bars and socialize with people my own age or older — not teenagers, not children. Drinking legally meant adult conversation on adult topics, accompanied by adult music. It also meant adult dating (with, one hoped, adult results). Drinking legally meant dropping into a bar after work, or in the middle of the day, or after a movie, or … well, whenever I felt like it and for whatever reason or no reason at all. Because I was an adult.

Which brings me to a major problem in the adult drinking world: children in bars. Argue all you want about the hypocrisy of the drinking age or our Puritanical mindset. Hit me, if you’d like, with your fond memories of pubs in the British Isles where generations upon generations gather ’round to sing the songs of olde. I’m not interested. What interests me is preserving our bars, lounges and cocktail conclaves for the people they were built for — the adult drinking public.

Mom and dad, if you want to go out and down a few, please hire a sitter. Don’t slam your stroller into my stool, elaborately set up a mini-day care center in a nearby booth, and then spend the rest of the evening pestering the barkeep for apple juice. And you, alterna-couple, if you’re going to bring little Jake or Lola into my local, show a little courtesy. Propping your spiky-haired, ironic-T-shirt clad offspring on the bar and plying him/her with Shirley Temples is fun for a while. But it gets old. Fast.

Look, like most of you, I love the pat-pat-pat of little feet and the cute cooing of the cunning and the cuddly. Kids are OK by me. In fact, I believe that children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way. Just keep them out of my bar.

Unless they’ve got a valid ID.

As I had hoped, Tales - the reckoning has generated some feedback, both positive and negative, both online and off. Some people have appreciated my honesty in pointing out some of the problems with this year’s event, and some have called the post too negative. This is my response to the latter group.

First, there is no doubt that Tales is a whopper of an event to plan, and it takes a ton of dedicated people, many of them volunteers, to pull it off. I never intended to diss those people — hell, I’m one of them. Playing my own small part as a volunteer, I gave a presentation about Tales at a Boston travel show this winter, spent time organizing my panel on media coverage for the bar and spirits industry (I even brought with me to New Orleans the bottles of Amer Picon required for one of my recipes), and helped promote Tales both through drinkboston.com and the Tales Blog. All of what I wrote about Tales up to “the reckoning” has been positive. And it has been honest.

So it would have been dishonest of me, after the dozen or so posts I have written about Tales and New Orleans, not to report on the flaws that occurred this year. They could not be ignored. And just to make sure I wasn’t a lone, pissy voice in the blogosphere, I solicited comments in order to get multiple, honest takes on the matter from others who attended. I hope the comments keep coming. Because if you take the time to comment, it’s probably because, like me, you appreciate that Tales is the premier spirits event in the U.S., and you want it to keep being as awesome as it has been in the past.

God bless Boston Globe correspondent Liza Weisstuch. She attended the events of Tales of the Cocktail with, of all things, a notebook, writing things down. Her short, sharp summaries of each day appear in today’s Globe article “Mixing it up with the best of them.” Not that I’m mentioned anywhere in the article. Nope, not at all.

No doubt you’ve gleaned from my previous posts that I had a blast at Tales of the Cocktail this year. I mean, running around the Hotel Monteleone with a “Presenter” badge, getting into any session or tasting room I wanted, plus getting invited to parties and other special events around town — how could I not have fun?

That said, as everyone who was at Tales this year knows, there were some, uh, issues. Attendance at many, if not most, of the panels was overflowing. That this event has become so popular is great, but the unpreparedness for the crowds that turned up this year was woeful. Many sessions did not have enough seats, drink samples or servers. The brandies for the Cognac and Armagnac session were delivered to the room late, some as much as an hour into the tasting. The second cocktail featured in the Three Amigos session didn’t get delivered to the row of tables I was sitting in. Paul Pacult’s scotch-tasting seminar had far too few samples for the crowd that showed up. The Tales Apprentices, who were tasked with batching all of the cocktails — including squeezing fresh citrus — for five days’ worth of events, were far too few in number and far too overworked as a result. (”Apprentice” is a misnomer — these people included many of the nation’s best young bartenders and were overseen by Phil Ward of Death & Co. in New York). And so on.

(I know what some of you are thinking: ‘It’s a cocktail conference for chrissakes.’ Well, I was there last year, and things went pretty smoothly despite the constant presence of alcohol.)

Look, I have no intel yet on the reasons behind the unpreparedness, and for all I know there are some legitimate explanations. But I couldn’t help but ask myself: How would I feel if I had actually bought tickets for the event? Would I ever want to go to Tales again? I talked to one Boston couple who said that, despite the glitches, they would go back. The reason was that they loved New Orleans, and Tales week is a good time to go … But they also said they would attend fewer sessions in the future.

And so, I have a request for any ticket-buying Tales attendee who reads this: Please leave a comment about your experiences last week. Was it fun? Was it worth it? Would you go back?

This just in from Green Street bar manager Misty Kalkofen regarding the Hendrick’s Beantown Bartender Battle at Green Street on August 5: “We’ve extended the deadline for recipe submissions to Sunday. As many of us were busy destroying our livers in NOLA, Charlotte [Voisey, Hendrick’s brand ambassador] and I felt many folks could use a couple of extra days. Email your submissions to Charlotte and start working on a limerick!”

Late Friday morning, walking into the Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans with my coffee, I bump into Jeffrey Morgenthaler of Eugene, Oregon. He’s one of the many blogger-bartenders featured at Tales of the Cocktail this year. He tells me that at 9:00 p.m., he, Daniel Shoemaker from the Teardrop Lounge in Portland, Oregon, and Erik Adkins from the Slanted Door in San Francisco are planning a mix-off at the pool on the roof of the Monteleone. The kicker is that their ingredients can come only from Jeff’s swag bag — the pile of nips, mixers and other cocktail accoutrements that sponsors give presenters at Tales. I say I’ll be there, thinking, ‘That’s the best idea I’ve heard all week.’ I tell my fellow Bostonian and Tales blogger Misty Kalkofen about it, and she wants in.

We arrive at the pool at 9:00, and the contestants are milling around a table laden with a bunch of small liquor bottles, three shakers and three hotel-room tumblers. They see us and say, “Great, our other two judges are here.” It turns out we’re not just there as casual bystanders. We are going to be picking the winner of Swag-Off ‘08. OMG! The third judge is Keith Waldbauer, bartender at Union in Seattle and blogger of Moving at the Speed of Life. Not only that, Natalie Bovis-Nelson, aka the Liquid Muse, has brought her film crew along to capture the contest for the Tales webisodes she’s producing this year. (See Webisode #4 — the event falls somewhere in the middle of the six-minute piece. The footage of the actual judging didn’t make the cut, unfortunately.)

The only contest rule is that the French, grape-based G’Vine Gin must be used as a base, since the swag bag features it in greater quantity than any of the other spirits. (Jeff’s detailed account of the contest, including approximate recipes, is on the Tales Blog.) We’re talking serious creativity with a dash of sarcasm. Erik scents his glass with the smoke of a Navan Vanilla Liqueur aromatherapy candle. Jeff muddles Sour Green Apple Cocktail Candy with bitters. And Daniel spices his drink with chili powder. (The corresponding drinks are, in order, the Day Spa, the Green Mile and the Seat of the Pants.)

We judges declare Daniel’s Seat of the Pants, with its inventive melange of Angostura bitters, agave nectar, gin, grappa, Campari and, yes, chili powder, the winner. Jeff’s is a close second — it’s a bit too fruity for us (I liken it to Tropical Lifesavers), but it is actually a balanced cocktail. And Erik’s is the oddball, with the most gentle flavor of all despite a whopping two ounces of gin.

Later that night and the next day, everyone involved in the swag-off tells everyone they know about it, and word of this brilliant idea spreads quickly. Walking into the Napoleon House for lunch on Saturday, I bump into one of the drinks world’s biggest celebs, David Wondrich. He says, “Hey, I heard about the mix-off last night. That sounds great.” Damn, I think Swag-Off ‘09 is going to need a bigger pool.

My latest on the Tales Blog: Jerry’s Kids and the Three Amigos. Last night, a huge party at the International House, where pretty much the majority of the world’s best bartenders gathered for an impromptu group photo. I hope to post one of those shots here soon.

My first post on the Tales Blog, “I drank what?!,” is up. It chronicles my fun-filled (OK, too-fun-filled) second day here. Here, I present my third day, yesterday, in pictures. First was a cognac and armagnac tasting (10 brandies and three cocktails!). Then the Tales Cocktail Hour with authors, bartenders and other VIPs in the spirits world (including Boston’s own Misty Kalkofen) making cocktails. After that, a delicious dinner of pork belly at Herbsaint. Finally, Miller High Life and music at Vaughan’s. Oh, and this morning: Jerry’s Kids: The Life, Drinks and Legacy of Professor Jerry Thomas. Interesting stuff — more on that coming up in my next Tales Blog post.