By JONATHAN MILES

Back in the 1980s, the makers of Benedictine liqueur hatched an ad slogan for B&B, which is Benedictine bottled with brandy: ¡°Living well is the best revenge.¡±

Nice point. But as Solomon Gursky, the lead character in Mordecai Richler¡¯s 1989 novel ¡°Solomon Gursky Was Here,¡± countered, ¡°Living twice, maybe three times, is the best revenge.¡±

Benedictine, which celebrates its 500th anniversary in 2010, has done both: It has lived well, having evolved from a bitter medicine formulated by French monks into a fancy after-dinner liqueur, and crammed two or three lives into its half-millennium history.

Its latest life - as a rediscovered component in haute cocktails - is currently unfolding, particularly in New York City, where craft bartenders have latched onto the liqueur in much the same way they¡¯ve taken up Chartreuse, another herbal, monastery-derived liqueur.

¡°It¡¯s got serious street cred,¡± said Damon Dyer, a bartender at Louis 649 in the East Village, ¡°and brings a certain something-something to a drink.¡±

That certain something-something comes from a blend of 27 herbs and spices that a monk named Dom Bernardo Vincelli distilled in 1510 at a Benedictine monastery in Fecamp, France, in Normandy. Dom Vincelli¡¯s Elixir, as it was called then, was a hit until the French Revolution, when the monastery was destroyed. The recipe was lost until an art collector and wine merchant named Alexander Le Grand discovered it within a trove of old books he bought in 1863. After toying with the recipe, Le Grand began selling the elixir as Benedictine - for pleasure, this time, rather than for medicinal reasons.

It was a minor player in the United States until the 1930s, when a brushfire of a drink called a B&B - equal parts Benedictine and brandy, created at the ¡°21¡± Club in New York - swept the nation. The Le Grand family¡¯s response was to bottle the cocktail itself, mixing Cognac with the liqueur and selling it as B&B.

B&B still outsells Benedictine nine to one in the United States, according to a company spokesman, but it is the original undiluted product that has lately been stoking the curiosity of bartenders. As Mr. Dyer put it, ¡°I don¡¯t want my peanut butter and jelly in the same jar, you know?¡±

The moral of the story, according to Mr. Dyer: ¡°We don¡¯t always need to reach for the newest, shiniest, flashiest-labeled product on the shelf. Shiny and new aren¡¯t always better.¡±