I tested four restaurants are bars on their Sazerac performance this year, and the results, at first, were pretty damn sorry. Abysmal, in fact.

My first failure was served to me at Jacques-Imo’s Cafe, a very loose-limbed, funky and excellent restaurant in the Uptown neighborhood, right next to the famous Maple Tree Bar. They must have sloshed the simple syrup in out of a bucket, it was so tooth-achingly sweet. And I can’t be sure, but I think they shook my Sazerac. It foamed like a rabid dog.

The second disaster was at Coop’s Place, a dive-like place on Decatur that serves excellent downhome New Orleans cuisine. To avoid my Jacques-Imo experience, I cautioned the bartender not to make the drink too sweet. “Why would it be sweet?” he replied. “There’s no sugar in it.”

Say what? I reminded him of the little matter of the sugar cube that’s part of the recipe. He said they didn’t make them that way; just put in a drop of syrup. OK. Worth a shot. But his Sazerac (below) was too dry and arid. It was missing a major component, and was quite difficult to drink.

Saturday, July 19, my last full day at “Tales of the Cocktail,” I managed to sample two more New Orleans Sazeracs.

The first was at Jean Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, a classic bar on Bourbon Street. I admit I was a bit foolhardy to order the drink. The tavern is largely a laid-back beer place. But I couldn’t help myself. The bartender used a bit too much Pernod (no one seems to have gotten into the Absinthe groove yet in NOLA), but he showed respect for the drink by putting it into a rocks glass, as opposed to a plastic cup, the vessel of most other drinks he was serving.

The second was at Mr. B.’s Bistro, a Brennan family joint right across from the Hotel Monteleone. It had been recommended for its food and the traditional New Orleans chow didn’t disappoint. I liked my bartender. He was respectful, attentive and serious, without being pompous. I asked that my Sazerac not be too sweet and he obliged by taking great care with the drink. He used Old Overholt, Herbsaint and Peychaud’s bitters, eschewing the Angostura that some favor.

This was the winner of the week! It was a princely drink. Maybe not the best Sazerac I’ve ever had, but I had no complaints.

That’s all, until next year.

One other note: While in NOLA, I picked up an old copy the Holiday Magazine Book of The World’s Fine Foods, which contained an essay by bygone New York bon vivant Lucius Beebe called “A Spendthrift Guide to New York.” In it, he hits NYC’s fine restaurants and bars, circa 1960, with a vengeance. Check out this post. It’s an interesting window into the drinking mores of the time.

This past week, I felt as if I was already at Tales of the Cocktail. Or a miniature version of it, anyway. From Monday, April 28, to Friday, May 2, I was the prisoner—uh, I mean, guest of the Beverage Alcohol Resource, the New York-based spirits institute founded by the mighty fivesome of Dale DeGroff, Doug Frost, Steve Olsen, F. Paul Pacult and David Wondrich. All five will be manning one panel or another at this year’s Tales.

Once every fall and once every spring, B.A.R. holds a week-long intensive Intermediate Certificate Program. It is manned by the above five, who trade off demonstrations, tastings and lectures like some sort of tough-love tag team. One samples roughly 150 different spirits, mixes up a raft of cocktails, reads and memorizes a thick manual, absorbs another manual’s worth of material in class, creates tinctures and somehow invents a new cocktail, and every now and then takes a half-hour break to breathe into a paper bag. One does not count on doing anything else during this week, other than sleep. They had me for 50 hours during those five days, culminated in five separate tests. And I’m not even counting the hours of outside study and at-home cocktail mixing and experimentation. The whole thing went down at the beautifully appointed Astor Center—the nicest, best equipped desk I’ve ever sat at.

Others present whom I expect to see at Tales of the Cocktail include Willie Shine and Leo DeGroff, who assisted the Furious Five; and Robert Cooper, creator of St. Germain, who was a fellow student.

One of the pleasures of the Tales of the Cocktail spirits convention is that one’s examination and exploration of cocktail culture can continue far beyond the many information and enjoyable events and seminars sponsored by the organization. The action does take place in New Orleans, after all, home, arguably, of more fine taverns that any other city in the U.S. of. A.

New Orleans is alone, I think, in one particular respect regarding bars. In our country’s bigger cities, you can find more saloons per capita, I’m certain. And New York City is home to the tightest collection of elite, high-end, cocktail dens. But The Big Easy combines these two ideals. It possesses a great many regular-guy bars that are still capable of serving superior mixed drinks. Hard to get that in Gotham. Either you’re in a regular Joe bar, or a cocktailian utopia. The twain do not generally meet.

This circumstance allows a gentleman opportunity to conduct an epicurean drinking study without fear of running out of outlets to do so. At last year’s TOTC, I used my off hours to test the state of the Sazerac in New Orleans. This was the City of the Sazerac, after all, and I wanted to see how they were holding up. I sampled them at the Monteleone Hotel’s Carousel Bar, Commander’s Palace, Bayona and a couple other places. I enjoyed all of them, the one at Bayona perhaps the most. Upon return to NYC, I learned from some parties that the Sazerac currently being served in New Orleans is on the sweet side—a sop to the flavored vodka crowd. Could be. Probably so. They were still good.

I will most likely continue my search this year, checking into a few places I didn’t get to last time—Tujague’s, Jean Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, etc. Also Napoleon House, where I always go, but invariably order a Pimm’s cup.

Is it asking for trouble to order a Sazerac at Pat O’Brien’s, home of the Hurricane?