"Bar Month" at OnMilwaukee.com – brought to you by Hornitos, OR-G, Party Armor, Red Stag, Absolut, Fireball and Malibu – is back for another round! The whole month of February, we're serving up intoxicatingly fun articles on bars and clubs – including guides, the latest trends, bar reviews and more. Grab a designated driver and dive in!

I've traveled to New Orleans many times, beginning in 1993 with a non-stop, 24-hour, cross-country drive with five other people in a small Mazda pickup. We made the drive to be at Carnival, staying up for two days straight, sleeping only after being swept out of the Quarter with everyone else by NOLA mounted police at midnight on Fat Tuesday (Mardi Gras).

My four most recent trips to the Crescent City were all post-Katrina, and all a little more adult-oriented (just as boozy and blurry, mind you, but I was mostly seated in some of the city's great restaurants, without want or care for beads).

My love for New Orleans pales in comparison only to my love for Brew City and I intend to continue engaging in as much cross-cultural, "inter-municipal" exchange as both of these places can bear. I just got back from my last trip on Dec. 25, having finally enjoyed a sazerac, New Orleans' official drink.

A native to New Orleans, the sazerac is a whiskey drink that's getting a bit more notoriety outside Louisiana lately, perhaps due in part to the craft cocktail movement.

Drinking a sazerac was a true cultural experience (if culture is delimited to being that of cocktails drinkers who preferably like to do their imbibing in storied places of historical significance). While not the first cocktail (this myth was recently debunked when instances of the word "cocktail" were found in print predating the sazerac's invention) it remains one of America's finest drinks.

I have been watching the HBO series "Treme" via Netflix and other web-based sources for several months (both because of my love for most things New Orleans and because HBO series are clearly superior to anything you can find on "regular" TV – except maybe on Showtime). I took a special interest in an episode in which sazerac is as much a leading character as the people.

(This occurs during the as-of-yet-unreleased second season of "Treme" – please locate an aforementioned "web-based source" if you can't wait for it to be released, like me.)

In this episode, the character of New Orleans' chef Janette Desautel, played by Kim Dickens, walks up to a bartender where she is cooking and orders a sazerac – only so she can throw it in the face of food critic Alan Richman (who plays himself), who's eating in the restaurant.

"This is how the Creole faerie folk back home cure their three-day stubble," says the chef after throwing the sazerac, who through this action makes herself delightfully unemployed.

The reason she tossed the drink in Richman's face was because he wrote an extremely negative, and to some insensitive, at least for its timing, review of New Orleans' cuisine shortly after Katrina. (You can easily search the original article for the references to "faerie folk" and "stubble.")

Although this is pretty interesting stuff for folks who, like me, enjoy the blending of art and life and who follow all kinds of social commentary on New Orleans, what's really interesting is a part of the scene in which Dickens tells the bartender making the sazerac, "Do it the right way. Absinthe – just coat the glass."

Maybe more than most cocktails, there is a method to making the sazerac right, and this is referenced beautifully in the episode. So, what does it take to make a sazerac right?

"The bartender must take their time in making it and, preferably, make it with love," says Evan Barnes, bartender at Bryant's Cocktail Lounge, 1579 S. 9th St., and at Hotel Foster, 2028 E. North Ave.

Love probably is necessary, but there's a bit more. Here's the base method:

Using two old-fashioned glasses, fill one with ice and in the other muddle a sugar cube with three dashes of Peychaud's bitters. After muddling, add one and a half ounces of rye whiskey or brandy to the glass. Ditch the ice in the first glass and coat it with absinthe.

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