San Francisco has its new Lazarus, and it is a glass.

Lazarus was the most famous dog in Gold Rush San Francisco. He was mauled by a cur to within an inch of his life, and brought back from the grave by the ministrations of an unlikely nurse named Bummer. The city's pioneer newspapers reported this drama in breathtaking detail, declared the beast resurrected and christened him Lazarus.

Lazarus and his canine savior, Bummer, became the royal dogs of the court of the city's most famous eccentric, Emperor Norton, and their stories are the fountainhead of all San Francisco legends.

Now a city legend has itself been resurrected; after an intervention so unexpected as to be deemed miraculous, San Francisco's famed Irish coffee is back from the valley of the shadow of death.

Irish coffee had been all but down the drain for want of the special glass in which to make it, without which the drink becomes airport cocktail lounge swill.

The glass had been stamped "obsolete" and discontinued by its manufacturer. It was going to cost 250,000 bucks to resuscitate it, and nobody had the money.

But when the Midwest company that owns the patent read a front-page story in The Chronicle about nostalgic citizens caring enough to mourn a glass, it swallowed the startup costs, dusted off the mold and went back into production.

It is so rare for a city tradition to be rescued after having last rites read over it that Mayor Ed Lee has declared San Francisco Irish Coffee Day on July 28 to celebrate. San Francisco will use any excuse for a party, but it has never had a party for a glass.

Re-education camps for bartenders

Old Town San Francisco is defined not by longitude and latitude, but by bars on a path well traveled - Liverpool Lil's hard by the Presidio wall; the Marina Lounge on Chestnut; the Double Play on 16th and Bryant, across the street from the ghost of Seals Stadium; the 3300 Club at 29th and Mission; Lefty O'Doul's and Bing Crosby's old joint, the Gold Dust Lounge, by Union Square; Caesar's and Pier 23 along the waterfront; Mission Rock by AT&T Park; Gino & Carlo, La Rocca's and Capp's Corner in North Beach; and Sam Jordan's in Butchertown.

In the Old Town last week, bars were ordering cases of the spanking new "obsolete" glass. In some joints, there were re-education camps for rookie bartenders: Never make an Irish coffee in a mug or a wineglass, and no tooth fairy cups from a Walmart ceramic six-pack. Use the Glass.

It would be appropriate here to say a Hail Mary full of thanks for the uncommon grace and good sense of the Libbey Glass Co. of Toledo, Ohio. Libbey stopped making San Francisco Irish coffee glasses five years ago once its biggest customer, the Buena Vista, stopped reordering and took its glass business to China.

This is a story out of a Frank Capra movie. An unassuming, traditional Rust Belt manufacturing company swallows a nickel to make a special glass for a romantic city bewailing the loss of a sentimental drink.

The odds of getting Irish coffee back had been on a par with betting that the York family would get a heart transplant and keep the 49ers in San Francisco.

Libbey is the Midwest glassware giant that has been setting America's dinner table since Abe Lincoln was a country lawyer. The company's unexpected gesture to San Francisco seems more from some prairie sense of duty out of a Willa Cather novel than any routine profit motive.

Jay Achenbach is Libbey's executive vice president for marketing. He talks like Mr. Rogers. "It's nice to be wanted," he said. Gosh.

News of the 'miracle' spreads

This would not be a San Francisco story if there wasn't some intrigue, obfuscation and self-dealing.

Word that the rock had been removed from the tomb of Irish coffee first came to Tosca proprietor Jeannette Etheredge, who had started a little war with the Buena Vista Cafe over Irish coffee glasses when she found out she couldn't reorder any because the Buena Vista had pigged out on all the Irish coffee glasses on the market.

Etheredge received an unexpected sales call from her restaurant supply man, Ron Grenier, with news "of a goddam miracle" - Irish coffee glasses had, Lazarus-like, come back from the grave.

This was little thanks to the Buena Vista, which apparently had hoped to sell its imports to other bars and restaurants until the rumor spread among the locals that the new glasses were popping in the Buena Vista's washing machines like dime-store balloons.

Buena Vista owner Bob Freeman acknowledged that there had been a breakage problem with his first imports - too thin - but he said that the "third batch" of glasses, just in from China, was every bit as sturdy as the original Libbey glasses.

Word of this corporate seal of craftsmanship approval had apparently not trickled down to Buena Vista manager Larry Silva when I called to ask him how things were breaking.

"Now, on a bad day, we only break about 12 or so glasses a day," he said. I didn't ask what happened on the good days.

"Oh, my God, that makes me flinch," said Margaret Wade of Brennan's, the landmark Berkeley hofbrau by the train station, which is the second-largest dispenser of Irish coffee outside the Buena Vista in the Bay Area. She couldn't imagine how that amount of breakage could be sustainable.

The Buena Vista sells more Irish coffees each year to captive tourists at the end of the Hyde Street cable car line than are poured annually on all the island of Ireland. I wondered if the tourists minded little harmless hairline cracks, but manager Silva said he was teaching his new suppliers "quality control." He was not supremely confident that they could ever match what he called the "platinum standard" of Libbey's glass. "I like the Libbey better," Silva said.

"I don't need Libbey anymore," owner Freeman said.

Freeman has the natural optimism of a salesman born and true. He sold the red-meat American public on eating expensive steaks in uncomfortable old railroad cars as his Victoria Station chain went public and grew like Topsy in the 1970s, until it collapsed in a bankruptcy in the mid-1980s. There is general agreement among the city's bar fraternity about the rather beastly behavior of the Buena Vista in the Irish coffee imbroglio, but Freeman will hear none of that. He blames everything that went wrong on Libbey, in Toledo.

Freeman's alternate scenario is that he discovered that Libbey was going to stop making Irish coffee glasses because of market conditions, so the Buena Vista naturally had to buy up all the available stock on the market "and stash away glasses while we found an alternative source of supply."

"We've got ours," the proprietor of the Buena Vista said, asserting he was now willing, indeed eager, to "help out" other San Francisco bars whose supply of glasses had, lamentably, dried up. Left unsaid was that the only way the Buena Vista could fix the problem it had created was by selling other San Francisco saloons its Chinese Irish coffee glasses.

I sought a second opinion about what happened from the former Buena Vista general manager Michael Carden:

"Freeman created a local monopoly on a traditional item, and then held all the other bars in town hostage," he said.

Invented by Chronicle columnist

The history of the classic Irish coffee glass starts with Chronicle columnist Stanton Delaplane. In 1953, after experimenting during long nights with strong waters, he invented Irish coffee, San Francisco-style. His laboratory was the pre-tourist, then-old-boy hangout, the Buena Vista Cafe.

Delaplane's glass of choice was Libbey's elegant 6-ounce, uniquely heat-retaining "Georgian Irish Coffee" glass. His subsequent eloquent editorializing for Irish coffee made the glass an icon of San Francisco.

"Like sourdough bread and cold cracked crab, Irish coffee became a major part of the San Francisco mystique," said whiskey historian Steve Beal.

The queenly, petite glass was the secret to Delaplane's recipe, which is about something not often associated with San Francisco - moderation. The glass allows for just enough whiskey and not too much coffee, with barely room for three C&H sugar cubes at the bottom and aged whipping cream that floats like a halo on the top.

Times change and not necessarily for the better. San Francisco remains picky, but the rest of the country no longer gives a damn about the glass in which its Irish coffee is served.

Crate & Barrel advertises trailer-wide 8.5-ounce "Irish coffee" mugs with handles that stick out like Dumbo ears. The proportions of such large glasses morph Irish coffee into a hideous culinary jest. To cite no less an authority than Shakespeare, the drink therein "dies in its own too much."

2-year supply in 1 day

Libbey's man Achenbach saved the day. "We did a one-day run of Irish coffee glasses," he said. "We were happy to do it." He said a day's run was 72,000 glasses, which amounted to a two-year supply for San Francisco in the old days when Irish coffee was in flower.

The heartland company has shown San Francisco heart. Cranking up industrial machinery for what amounts to an ice cream run is an unusual thing for a manufacturing goliath. It's like The Chronicle turning on its big mother press to print a Kinko's job.

There is little demand for Irish coffee glasses except in San Francisco and certain wayward parts of Nevada, where it is the favored glass for Pisco Punch. The man from Libbey said he would keep the glass "on the line" if San Francisco responds by ordering its share. "If it earns its keep, it will stay there," Achenbach said in that matter-of-fact Midwestern way.

Irish Coffee Day is July 28 to commemorate the arrival of the first clipper ship, the Memnon, on July 28, 1849, after a 120-day speedy sail from New York, to resupply the Gold Rush city with the necessities of civilization - most certainly coffee and Irish whiskey. Those were the ingredients of the pre-Delaplane version of Frisco Irish coffee, in which the miners spiked their coffee and Irish whiskey with a pinch of gold dust.

There are far more San Francisco traditions in the dustbin of legend than on the registrar of resurrection. When Lazarus and his buddy Bummer died, they were stuffed and put on display in a bar. This time, the resurrection of the Lazarus of Irish coffee is happening in real time.

For the disposable-income denizens of the trendy eateries and mixology bars South of Market where the population churn has settled many new residents, July 28 is an opportunity to venture to North Beach for a bit of a history lesson in the ways of the Old City. If these people don't get out of Mixology Ghetto to be reminded why they came to San Francisco in the first place, they might as well be in Austin.