MISTY KALKOFEN

Bar manager at Green Street Grill

By CHRISTINE LIU

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"I've always been the nerdy kid," grins Misty Kalkofen, bar manager of Green Street Grill. She hoards books and historical barware ("I can't stop buying vintage glasses off eBay!"), and she readily confesses that her food-less kitchen overflows with booze bottles that spill from a hutch onto shelves and into the fridge. At home, she stocks four types of vermouth, Lillet and her own homemade grenadine. One of the most inventive, social and culturally literate bartenders in Boston, Kalkofen works relentlessly toward cultivating Boston's cocktail scene, and as a result, some of the most respected bartenders in town belly up to Kalkofen's Green Street bar.

In the spring of 2005, Kalkofen co-founded the Jack Rose Society with Jackson Cannon and Brother Cleve. They tasked themselves with the goal of methodically choosing, from among hundreds of recipes, the one Jack Rose drink for Cannon to serve at the then-soon-to-be-open Eastern Standard Kitchen and Drinks. The trio boldly formulated, tasted and tweaked. At the end of the scientific session ("How long did it take? Who knows?" says Kalkofen, laughing), they arrived at a tasty consensus: Applejack, fresh lemon juice, homemade grenadine and Peychaud bitters. Its charter mission complete, the Jack Rose Society has grown into a series of ongoing meet-ups with passionate Boston bartenders, addressing issues hands-on, from "Can a frozen drink ever trump a non-frozen drink?" (if you're wondering, the answer is a delicate no), to the challenges of crafting Scotch-based cocktails and tasting the stiff Suffering Bastard's many historical variants ("To do that in one sitting totally kicked our asses," recalls Kalkofen).

Last February, Kalkofen founded (and currently serves as president of) the 10-member Boston chapter of Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails (LUPEC). "We're all very different-a great group of women with crazy amounts of energy," she says. LUPEC members, who collectively cull their interests in both women's history and vintage cocktails, dedicate themselves to "breeding, raising and releasing nearly extinct drinks into the wild." They also host fundraisers for charities like domestic violence organizations or breast cancer research. (On August 19, Green Street Grill hosts LUPEC's Chartreuse Cocktails event, featuring four drinks-two classics, two originals-and a guest bartender dressed as a Carthusian monk.)

For Kalkofen, "creating cocktails that are part of a continuum from the classics" is what mixology is all about. "It's some sort of alchemy."

[Green Street Grill, 280 Green St., Cambridge. 617.876.1655]