Everyone has their one alcoholic nemesis. A cheap bottle of gin they drank in college, a painful shot of tequila that ruined a night back when they were young and swore them off the product for good.

For me, it's Jägermeister.

It was the summer of 2001. I was a 22-year-old bozo one month into living in New York (OK, Hoboken actually), partying on a chic rooftop in Greenwich Village. While most guests brought six-packs of beer, bottles of wine, or fifths of vodka, I thought it smart to bring Jägermeister. I imagined myself the star of the party as I walked around pouring shots for cool dudes and beguiling beautiful young women with my magical German elixir. Suffice to say, no one was interested and I ended up drinking the whole bottle by myself.

By morning I was throwing up straight purple.

That was the last time I drank Jäger and, luckily for me, there hasn't been much reason to drink it again in the 14 years since. Though the mere sound of that umlauted word has been poison to my ears since that night, as the years have gone by I've heard it less and less. The popularity of the German digestif began waning and by 2014 sales fell 5.6% in the U.S., Jäger's biggest market. Simultaneously, the new party shot of choice, Fireball, had exploded to over $61 million in worldwide sales.

As Austin bartender Dion Henderson matter-of-factly told Bloomberg Business, "Jäger is dead."

In fact, I'd all but forgotten it when last week I noticed a cocktail on the menu at Amor y Amargo in New York City. Called The Bachelorette, it was composed of absinthe, aged rum... and Jägermeister.

The East Village's Amor y Amargo is one of Manhattan's finest cocktail bars, the tiny "tasting room" focused exclusively on drinks made with obscure bitters and amaros. Nevertheless, I still thought something was awry. Was the Mast-Jägermeister SE corporation giving under-the-table payola to top Manhattan bartenders all of the sudden? Hardly. As Amor y Amargo's amicable beverage director Sother Teague told me, "I've just always been into it."

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that was true. Amor y Amargo opened four years ago and I recall even then a Jägermeister bottle prominently displayed in the center of their top shelf, its pewter stag's head pourer gleaming under the lights. Likewise, Teague has always sported a Jägermeister logoed sweatband on his forearm while working. I assumed these were playful affectations, an East Village hipness I would never understand. I was 100% wrong.

"I'm trying to bring Jägermeister back into the pantheon of great cocktail ingredients."

(Was it ever in the pantheon?)

Teague laughed.

"OK, then I'm trying to get it into the pantheon."

Amazingly, so are other mixologists, realizing there's better things to pair Jäger with than a can of Diet Red Bull, bro. A few blocks away from Amor y Amargo, Erin Sullivan of The Third Man makes a Jäger and yellow chartreuse root beer float called The Inside Scoop. Pam Wiznitzer and Josh Mazza of the Upper East Side's Seamstress offer a herbal liqueur-heavy cocktail called Province. And West Village speakeasy, The Garret, offers a playful potable dubbed Seriously Ain't Fancy which includes Fireball, Jameson, tequila, and, yes, Jäger.

As their menu explains, "We thought it would be fun to take all the liquors generally used as shots and show how they could be used in another craftier way.

Logan Demmy of Columbus, Ohio's Mouton has similar aspirations. He offered hot buttered Jäger this winter and even made molecular Jäger Bombs for a recent arts event.

"Jägermeister is one of those brands people have a knee-jerk reaction to, and I really enjoy the challenge of selling it," notes Demmy. "Most people haven't experienced a craft cocktail with Jägermeister. They've likely only ever tried it in bomb or shot format. In a cocktail, it's really quite lovely."

Teague has always thought Jägermeister lent itself to high-end cocktails, just as much as more beloved cocktail ingredients like Campari or Fernet-Branca. It makes sense. Unlike Fireball, which seemingly sprung up out of nowhere, Jägermeister has a prestigious history spanning 80 years since its creation in Wolfenbüttel, Germany in 1935. But history doesn't necessarily taste good.

Jägermeister is composed of 56 ingredients—most unknown to the public—including ginger, cinnamon, star anise, cardamom, and orange peel, all aged in oak barrels for a year. Every bit as complex as, say, the more esteemed herbal liqueur Bénédictine which is composed of a mere 27 ingredients.

In the past year, Teague has put five Jägered-up cocktails on his menu, from the super juicy Permission Timepiece to the tiki tropical German Vacation and even the Manhattan-redolent Redemption.

"Jäger never should have left us!" claims Danny Neff, the bar director at Holiday Cocktail Lounge. He likewise enjoys playing with customers' preconceived notions about so-called "shitty" drinks, currently offering Long Island Iced Tea on tap.

So why all the hate still, with many customers (like me) even hesitant to take a sip of Jägermeister? Teague, a graduate from California Culinary Academy and former technical chef for Alton Brown's Good Eats, thinks he knows why.

"Of the five tastes, bitter is the only acquired one. 'Bitter' actually registers as poison to us initially. Most of us drink Jäger ice cold. But something ice cold has no aroma and taste is 90% in the aroma. So when you shoot an ice-cold shot of Jäger it bypasses your nose and all you're left with is a bitter blast on your palate. Your brain's immediate reaction is, 'This is poison...and I need to evacuate it.'"

I'd like to use that logic as my excuse for that night in 2001, but I think I simply overindulged. This night in April, though, I drank four of Teague's beautifully-composed Jägermeister cocktails, enjoying them as much as any drinks I've had this year.

The next morning, I didn't throw up purple.

Aaron Goldfarb Aaron Goldfarb lives in Brooklyn and is a novelist and the author of 'Hacking Whiskey.'

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io