Shaking up the cocktail culture
Lauren Clark takes a sip of the pisco sour sitting in front of her and nods approvingly. She's sitting at the front bar at Eastern Standard, looking as comfortable on a Friday afternoon as the bartender on duty does.
"If you're a person like me who likes to hang out in bars and experience the whole bar show," she says, "you'll want to go to a place like this."
Clark founded DrinkBoston.com last year with the intention of celebrating bars just like Eastern Standard. It's the city's first comprehensive website dedicated to bars and drinks and provides an opinionated (yet fair) resource for local drinkers. "I wanted to trumpet the fact that there are people doing great things out there that aren't just the run-of-the-mill vodka drinks," she says.
She came up with the website idea while working as a freelance writer. Con stantly trawling the Web for tidbits about the best bars or bartenders, Clark says there wasn't much out there beyond a few reference sites.
"I wanted to know what bars were doing and what drinks they made," says Clark, who's also a research and development writer at MIT. "Eventually, I thought, I'm just going to have to do this myself." She settled on creating her own blog, which has separate pages for her weekly posts, profiles, bar reviews, cocktail news, and upcoming events.
Besides her journalistic qualifications, Clark has bartending in her blood -- both her father and brother worked in the industry, and so did she, logging hours during her student years at the University of New Hampshire. She supported herself slinging drinks "of the Sex on the Beach . . . variety," she quips. But after graduation and several years of writing full-time for a publishing company, she found herself stuck in a 9-to-5 rut.
It was the late 1990s and the microbrew revolution was in high gear, as was Clark's interest in beer.
"I was the toddler who would sit in my dad's lap and sip on his beer," she says. "I loved the flavor of it." She began educating herself on the nuances of various brews, and the more she learned, the more she wanted to know. Finally, she quit her job and picked up an internship (read: scrubbed tanks) at a microbrewery, which eventually led to an assistant brewer position at Cambridge Brewing Co. She later started writing again, this time for beer publications like "Yankee Brew News" and "Ale Street News," where she still pens the "Ms. Mug" column.
Ultimately, Clark's passion for cocktails trumped her interest in beer and she gave up brewing (though she still writes about both). These days, she's particularly keen on vintage, or classic, cocktails, as evidenced by the small collection of old cocktail recipe books she carries with her.
More bartenders are cultivating knowledge about vintage drinks, she says, including members of Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails, which recently launched a chapter in Boston. Started by Misty Kalkofen, a bartender at Green Street Grill, the Boston chapter dedicates itself to collecting little-known, or in some cases extinct, cocktail recipes.
"It's bringing back endangered cocktails and celebrating the boozy women of yore," says Clark, 40. And, no, it's not just an excuse to gather the girls and stir drinks (though that's part of the fun). The group aims to raise funds down the line, as well as introduce their discoveries to drinkers throughout the city.
Clark believes their efforts fall in line with a larger food revolution taking shape. Just like chefs before them, bartenders are finally getting recognition.
"They're here 80 hours a week, squeezing their own juices, making their own grenadine. They're very serious about it," she says. "And I'm trying to point out that some bars are better than others, some drinks are better than others, and some bartenders are better than others, too."
DrinkBoston.com and LUPEC host a "Chartreuse Cocktails" event Sunday at 7 p.m. at Green Street Grill, 280 Green St., Cambridge. Tickets are $35 and men are welcome. Call 617-876-1655 or e-mail lupecboston@gmail.com. 
