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So, I announce some interesting event at a bar, like a Boston-New York bartender exchange or a tasting of Old Tom gin, tell everyone to check it out, and then just skip to the next post without recollecting the pleasant times that have given me, as Diana Ross would say, the sweetest hangover. My bad. Here’s a little follow-up on recent events.

That bartender exchange between Eastern Standard and PDT? Well done. I don’t have any intel yet on how ES’s Kevin Martin fared in New York, but it was a pleasure to be PDT bartender Daniel Eun’s patron during his guest stint in Boston. The highlight for me was Daniel’s beer cocktail. It involved a vigorously shaken mixture of Aventinus (a delicious weizenbock from the German brewery G. Schneider & Son), Sailor Jerry Rum, a whole egg and a bit of nutmeg grated over the drink’s frothy crown. As I told a friend, that drink was so good I wanted to marry it. Or at least shack up with it for the winter.

The B-Side Group Hug was a lot of fun, with a roomful of regulars, industry people and cocktailians paying their boozy respects. Would some bartender out there please keep the B-Side’s Tommy Noble cocktail alive? I love this combo of gin, Pimm’s, simple syrup and lemon juice. It’s a great drink to start the evening with, and it’s perfect for brunch, too. Oh, and FYI: B-Side barmen Al and Russ are both doing stints at the old Downtown Crossing haunt Cafe Marliave, which has recently been re-vamped.

Last night at Deep Ellum, a dozen or so people — many of them industry — gathered on the back porch to taste Hayman’s Old Tom Gin and Dolin Vermouth with Eric Seed of the Minnesota-based import company Haus Alpenz. There were people from Rialto, Dante, Eastern Standard, the Wine Bottega and Reservoir Wine & Spirits. Luckily for my lazy ass, Fred and Andrea from the Cocktail Virgin Slut blog were there taking notes, so if you want details on these spirits (and on the Trilby cocktail that bartender Max Toste mixed with them), check out this post. Max also showcased the Old Tom in a Tom Collins and a Ramos Gin Fizz, among other delights.

Thanks again to all of you who make going out to bars in Boston more interesting and fun than ever.

I tend to be skeptical of trendy new drink menus, especially those at trendy new restaurants that are obviously cashing in on a popular concept. In this case, I’m talking about the drink menu at Mooo, which joins KO Prime as Boston’s latest postmodern steak house. These aren’t your grandfather’s steak houses, with their dark, gentleman’s club decor. These are steak houses for today’s stylish man or woman susceptible to sleek, wink-wink design, like blurred photos of calves on the wall above your meat-laden table, and ornate chandeliers ‘clothed’ in cylinders of parchment. Mooo, which replaced the Federalist in the XV Beacon Hotel, is the latest ultra-high-end offering from celebrity chef Jamie Mammano of Mistral and Sorellina.

Luckily, there is a drink at Mooo that hits the right note of wit and taste without trying too hard, and that is the Lady’s Martini: Lillet Blanc, fresh lemon juice and hibiscus syrup, chilled and served straight up with a champagne chaser. I don’t know why it’s called the Lady’s Martini — maybe because it’s pink and relatively low in alcohol. It also happens to be gorgeous and delicious. Mooo serves the “martini” in a delicate, vintage-looking cocktail glass and the champagne chaser in a stemless flute, an aesthetic combination that makes you feel sophisticated just by sitting in front of it. But that’s not what we’re about, is it? We’re about flavor. And this cocktail has a layered, sweet-tartness that would satisfy even without the champagne. But when you put the bubbles on top of this little flavor lozenge, you suddenly feel like you’re wearing white gloves and smart hat.

All you men out there who appreciate a good cocktail: I urge you to be secure enough in your masculinity to give the Lady’s Martini ($13) a try. Or at least have your date order it, and taste hers.

The first time I tried a Moto Guzzi, I had no idea that all it was was equal parts Booker’s bourbon* and Punt e Mes. I thought there were at least some bitters in there, or two kinds of vermouth. Nope. Turns out the Moto Guzzi is the White Stripes of cocktails: like the guitarist and drummer that make up the entire band, the two ingredients in the cocktail create something raucous, deep and compelling. You can find the complete recipe here.

Moto Guzzi is an Italian motorcycle manufacturer established in 1921. It’s famous for its eagle logo, its racing achievements, and its cool bikes. Kevin Montuori, a motorcycle enthusiast and regular at No. 9 Park, invented this cocktail with 9 Park’s principal bartender, John Gertsen. This is their story.

John: “One fuzzy night at the bar at No. 9 … Kevin Montuori and I were discussing the possibility of using Booker’s in a cocktail. Given the alcohol content, we discussed manhattans and the various ratios. It seemed like Booker’s could support as much vermouth as we could give it. With all that vermouth the Angostura bitters sorta disappeared. Enter, stage right: Punt e Mes. It was perfect. I was thinking of some Manly Italian Name, and Kevin is a motorcycle/scooter aficionado. Somehow Moto Guzzi was brought up. It probably sounded more like ‘mrtigtzy’ after all of that Booker’s. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

Kevin: “That’s it exactly. I always remember the amount of restraint it takes to make one: no bitters, no lemon oil spritzed over the top. Just the Punt e Mes and Booker’s. And it really was ‘mrtigtzy’ after a couple. The name was, if I recall, also influenced by the texture, which is sort of like used engine oil. Certainly one of my favorite drinks. Damn, now I’m thirsty.”

*From the Small Batch website: Booker’s is 6-8 year-old bourbon, 121-127 proof (uncut, straight from the barrel). “Big oak, vanilla, smoky charcoal” aroma. “Intense, fruit, tannin, tobacco” taste.

As a proselytizer for “classic cocktails,” I am often at a loss when I try to explain to people what I mean by that term. My mind gropes futilely, trying to single out that obscure recipe that represents the vast treasury of pre-Prohibition drinks. Then, one day, I was flipping through the Old Waldorf Astoria Bar Book and noticed something that would astonish most modern drinkers: over one-third of the recipes in that book contain vermouth — either sweet (red/Italian) or dry (white/French), or both together. Ha, now there was a fact that would both grab the attention of the uninitiated and give them an example of what makes classic cocktails classic.

In the present day, vermouth is viewed as a relic from an era when people apparently enjoyed drinking poison. At least, that’s what you’d think vermouth was given the way modern Martini drinkers shudder at the notion of more than a drop of the stuff mucking up their chilled vodka with olives. That’s how we’ve all been conditioned for decades: the drier the Martini the better, so lose the vermouth. And while you’re at it, strip the drink of all remaining flavor by replacing gin with vodka.

When you think about it, that’s just weird. I mean, why did the Martini ever become popular in the first place? Because it used to be a great drink. Try this: two-thirds London dry gin and one-third dry vermouth stirred for a good minute over cracked ice and served straight up with a lemon twist. (Add a dash of orange bitters and an olive if you want to.) It’ll make you understand why vermouth is worthy of respect. Without a liberal dose of it, the Martini would never have achieved fame.

Not just in the Martini, but in many classic cocktails, vermouth adds roundness to the strong taste of spirits. It can also knit together other flavors. It’s kind of like the standard onion-celery-carrot base of many soups — you don’t taste those flavors up front, but without them the soup lacks savoriness and dimension.

Take, for instance, the El Presidente and the Scoff Law. Without dry vermouth, the former would be a forgettable, sweet drink, and the latter would be a disjointed combination of flavors. The Independent has a slight variation of the El Presidente on its current menu; it contains a little fresh lime juice, and it’s delicious and refreshing. The Scoff Law is a drink that’ll probably wind up on the menu for drinkboston’s upcoming Chartreuse Cocktails event at Green Street. The flavors balance each other out and create an entirely new taste. (There’s a Scoff Law variation, also delicious, with rye, dry vermouth, lemon juice and grenadine.)

Now that you realize vermouth is not poison, but instead an indispensible cocktail ingredient, here are the rules for stocking it in your home bar: buy small bottles, which take less time to finish; keep vermouth refrigerated after you open it; and choose decent brands like Noilly Prat or Martini & Rossi. The good brands are still cheap — a 375ml bottle of Martini & Rossi will set you back $4. Simply keep in mind that vermouth is essentially red or white wine that’s flavored with herbs and lightly fortified to an alcohol content of 16 percent (compared to 12-14 percent for regular wine), so it should be treated similarly to wine. That means throw away those bottles you last opened for a party in 1995 and start fresh. Then mix up a batch of old-school Martinis, invite your friends over, and change their lives.

Wow. As we say in New England, that was wicked awesome. The last time I was in New Orleans, I was a dumb college kid hanging out on Bourbon St. drinking Hurricanes with the rest of the tourists. Fast-forward many years to Tales of the Cocktail 2007, where I attended seminars on vermouth and pimento dram and drank Pimm’s Cups at the honorable Napoleon House. The older, wiser me had a much better time.

If drinking cocktails for breakfast, lunch and dinner, then going out at night for more cocktails, is your idea of heaven, this is the event — and the town — for you. At a 10 a.m. session on applejack, we were served a Golden Dawn, a Jack Rose and a Wicked Kiss (a Widow’s Kiss with the addition of rye whiskey). Haigh (Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails), Gary Regan (The Joy of Mixology, Regan’s Orange Bitters), and Chad Solomon and Christy Pope (Cuff & Buttons) presided over the seminar with an unofficial fifth panelist: Lisa Laird of the Laird family. Yes, that Laird family, the ones who have produced Laird’s Applejack since the 1700s and who had George Washington over for dinner before the Battle of Monmouth. The cocktails were made with bonded Applejack, which is distilled with 100-percent apples (no grain neutral spirits) and aged for four years — and which, as far as I know, cannot be had in the Boston area. Too bad.

At Prohibition’s Shadow, which featured Haigh, David Wondrich, Robert Hess (drinkboy.com) and John Hall (distiller of Forty Creek Canadian whiskey), we sipped samples of Forty Creek, a blend of rye, corn and barley whiskies, all distilled separately then blended. That stuff was righteously smooth and had flavors of an old ale, like Thomas Hardy’s. Why Canadian whiskey? Well, where do you think speakeasies got their whiskey during Prohibition? The session itself turned into a bit of a speakeasy when John Myers, bartender, cocktail historian and author of the Thirstin’ Howl, suddenly pulled a bottle of Fernet out of his bag and began dispensing shots. Perfectly appropriate at this sort of convention.

Cocktails and the Blogosphere, another 10 a.m. session (oh, my head!) involved Fancy Free and Police Gazette cocktails by way of illustrating how obscure drinks get re-discovered and popularized through blogs. Full of whiskey and bitters, these are two libations that’ll set the vintage-cocktail enthusiast’s heart aflutter. Paul Clark (Cocktail Chronicles), Chuck Taggart (Gumbo Pages), Darcy O’Neil (The Art of Drink) and Rick Stutz (Kaiser Penguin) presided. The session’s money quote (by Paul, I think): “At the 10th anniversary of Tales of the Cocktail, we’ll be talking about the recently launched 100,000th drink blog.”

The money quote from the session simply titled Vermouth (with Haigh and Martin Doudoroff, the geniuses behind cocktaildb.com) came from Haigh just as we started: “It’s 11:30 in the morning, and you guys are at a session on vermouth? Get a life!” We sipped a Marconi Wireless (speaking of bloggers rediscovering old drinks) and a Rose and learned that it’s really hard to get information from vermouth producers (Martini & Rossi, Noilly Prat, etc.) on the spices they use to turn red or white wine into a classic cocktail ingredient. One of the panelists did manage to get hold of some info, and she recited a list of ingredients used in M&R and NP, but I was way beyond note taking at that point.

The Lost Ingredients session was a trip. I had never even heard of pimento dram or Batavia arrack, much less tasted them, before that day. The session was basically a live interpretation of “Gone but Not Forgotten,” the article Clarke wrote for the current issue of Imbibe. I urge any cocktail enthusiast to pick up that issue, because Clarke’s article includes info (and some recipes) on some of the amazing, re-emerging spirits we sampled at Lost Ingredients, including: pimento dram, a rum-based, allspice-flavored liqueur rarely found outside Jamaica — we sampled Taggart’s homemade version; Batavia arrack, a sugar cane- and fermented rice-based spirit produced in Java (formerly the Dutch colony of Batavia) and the basis of Swedish punsch; and falernum, a low-alcohol syrup flavored with limes, ginger, almonds and clove and a key ingredient in many tiki drinks. Read more about the Lost Ingredients session here.

Finally, Sunday brunch: absinthe with a little sugar. I walked into that session a little late, and when I entered the room … wow, the licorice perfume enveloped me, a sensory experience I’ll never forget. Chemist and absinthe expert Ted Breaux gave a comprehensive presentation about absinthe history, myth and legal status, which is apparently still kind of fuzzy in the U.S. He devised the recipe for the new, legal-in-the-U.S. absinthe Lucid, which contains wormwood but only a barely measurable amount of wormwood’s active and feared ingredient, thujone. Anyhoo… somehow we were drinking real Swiss and French absinthe (the latter produced from a recipe of Breaux’s) in the traditional way, by very slowly letting ice water drip into the glass until the liquid became cloudy. This stuff was strong — over 130 proof! I don’t think absinthe should be banned, but I’m not sure if I recommend it as the first meal of the day.

In my next post, I’ll provide some snapshots of what happened outside of the Tales of the Cocktail sessions.

Max Toste, bartender and co-partner of the Allston beer and cocktail bar Deep Ellum, is quite pleased when he tells me that he sells more sweet vermouth than Absolut, and more rye whiskey than Jack Daniels, as if all is going according to plan. Well, it is. When you put four different Manhattans on your cocktail menu, you’re going to go through some rye and vermouth. Here are the historically correct options under Deep Ellum’s “Manhattan 4 Ways”:

All of the below are 2 parts whiskey to 1 part sweet vermouth, except for the New School.

1930s - Rye (my fave)
Sugar cube muddled with 2 dashes Peychaud’s, 1 dash Angostura; twist
Stirred, straight-up

1950s - Bourbon (Deep Ellum uses W.L. Weller)
Angostura, bourbon-and-vermouth-soaked cherry
Stirred, straight-up

1970s - Canadian Club (Max’s grandfather’s recipe)
Angostura, twist
On the rocks

New School - Maker’s Mark
2 1/2 oz Maker’s Mark, 1/2 oz sweet vermouth; Angostura, cherry
Stirred, straight-up

And congrats to Max! He recently welcomed a baby daughter into the world.

My friend Al Capone, proprietor of Capone Foods in Somerville (and the soon-to-open Capone Foods Cambridge on north Mass Ave.), is known to begin a night out with the classic aperitivo Punt e Mes and soda. Punt e Mes is an Italian vermouth called a “quinquina” because quinine, a bitter bark, is said to be among the many botanicals providing the wine’s color and flavor. At first sip, it has the rich, mellow sweetness you get with standard Italian vermouth, but then it reveals its own distinctive layers of flavor, finishing with that medicinal kick.

“Its name (’point and a half’) in the dialect of Turin, came from the day when an absent-minded stock exchange agent called out the trading floor term in old man Antonio Carpano’s bar, asking for a vermouth with a half-dose of bitters,” according to drinkshop.com. That day was in the late 1800s, so needless to say the recipe caught on.

Now, in the early 21st century, with more and more people on the hunt for “forgotton” spirits, a lot more Boston bars are carrying Punt e Mes and other aperitifs like Lillet (Blanc and Rouge) and Dubonnet. Recently, I urged Al to switch up his usual Punt e Mes and soda, just once, for an Italian Greyhound: half fresh grapefruit juice and half Punt e Mes on the rocks in an Old Fashioned glass with a salted rim. (A standard Greyhound is vodka and grapefruit.) Wow, talk about layers of flavor — and in a drink that doesn’t bonk you over the head with alcoholic strength. No. 9 Park introduced me to this heavenly cocktail, but I have to credit Scott Holliday, the former bar manager of Chez Henri, with first making me aware of the Punt e Mes and grapefruit combo (minus the salt). I have to admit that I tried making it at home once with Tropicana Grapefruit Juice, but it just didn’t work. You gotta go with the fresh fruit.

Oh, and check out the groovy Punt e Mes website. It’s mostly in Italian, but its tagline, written in a “Laugh In” font, says that “Punt e Mes is back,” and each page sports its own funky-lounge music clip and the mashup phrase “L’Appuntamento Yes.”

Maine-based journalist Wayne Curtis is an understated and witty writer who can tell a solid yarn about a cocktail’s history. He wrote this article, about “tracking a lost Cuban cocktail to its lair,” for Lost magazine. Here’s the recipe for El Presidente, verbatim from the article:

Over ice in a tall mixing glass, pour:

1-1/2 oz. rum

3/4 oz. curacao

3/4 oz. dry vermouth

1/2 tsp of grenadine

Stir well with ice for three or four minutes, then strain into cocktail glass. Garnish with an orange peel twist.

When Esquire drinks writer David Wondrich made a guest appearance behind the bar at Eastern Standard a couple of weeks ago, he mixed a drink I’d never had before: the Saratoga. Equal parts cognac, rye and sweet vermouth, the Saratoga is one of those cocktails that flies in the face of the number-one rule you were taught during your formative drinking years: do not mix your spirits. Cognac and rye? Mixed together in the same glass? Run and hide!

No, don’t. Try it. It’s one of those drinks whose seemingly simple ingredients and proportions form something eye-openingly new. Here’s the recipe, along with the brands of liquor Wondrich used that evening. Note: he colored outside the lines with the bitters he used — a Peruvian brand that Eastern Standard happened to have lying around. They were a bit funky.

Saratoga Cocktail
1 oz cognac (Hine)
1 oz rye (Rittenhouse 100-Proof)
1 oz sweet vermouth (Martini & Rossi)
2 dashes Angostura bitters or other aromatic bitters, such as Fee’s Old-Fashioned
Stir well with ice. Strain into chilled cocktail glass and twist a lemon peel over the top.

If you order this in a bar, be sure to specify that it’s the above version you want. There are several other cocktails named Saratoga, and they tend to involve maraschino liqueur and/or pineapple syrup.

Experimentation can be a tough thing to do at a neighborhood bar, but Jess Willis, the general manager of the Independent (75 Union Sq. Somerville), has boldly ventured backward in time to create the Indo’s current cocktail menu. She put the Fitzgerald, the Brandy Alexander and the Algonquin on there. Then she dug deep into the vault and dusted off the Gin and It. Praise the lord.

This is one weird cocktail by the standards of the contemporary world, where anyone who orders a Martini expects a mixture of about 50 parts gin or vodka to one part dry (white) vermouth. Well, get this: the Gin and It calls for sweet (red) vermouth, and lots of it. (Vermouth is red or white wine flavored with herbs and spices, lightly fortified with grain neutral spirit and, in the case of red vermouth, lightly sweetened.) The recipe in Dale DeGroff’s book The Craft of the Cocktail consists of equal parts (1.5 ounces each) gin and sweet vermouth, plus a dash of Angostura bitters and an orange peel. DeGroff explains: “The Gin and It was actually ordered in the Hoffman House and other New York bars of the 1880s and ’90s, simply as a Sweet Martini, and later as a Gin and Italian. During Prohibition, Gin and Italian was shortened to Gin and It.”

A brief web search turned up recipes for the drink varying from the half-and-half version above to two parts gin, one part sweet (Italian) vermouth. But Jess decided to trick her version out with three parts vermouth to one part gin. Eeewww, you’re saying. That’s because vermouth has unfairly come to be viewed as a necessary evil to be administered only by the nano-liter so that people can claim they’re drinking, say, a Manhattan instead of a chilled whiskey with a cherry. The fact is, without vermouth, the “cocktail” would not exist. It’s an ingredient as essential to the pantheon of mixed drinks as bitters and spirits. The Indo’s Gin and It, which also benefits from a dash of orange bitters, is tasty proof of this. Check it out for $8.