At the fourth annual “Tales of the Cocktail” convention in New Orleans, authors, mixologists, students, and journalists gathered in the French Quarter to talk about cocktails, learn about cocktails, mix cocktails — and, oh yes, to drink cocktails.

New Orleans last month (when the conference took place) was not the city it was in July 2005. Last year’s edition of “Tales of the Cocktail” ended August 20, little more than a week before Hurricane Katrina made landfall and changed the annual event’s host city forever. The event’s founder, Ann Rogers, evacuated her family on August 28 and relocated to New York City for a few months, before returning to New Orleans in January. Her house in the neighborhood of Lakeview was flooded.

Despite that close shave, “Tales of the Cocktail” returned. It didn’t occur to Ms. Rogers to find another host city. “I don’t know why,” she said. “I’m very passionate about this event, very passionate about New Orleans.” She did, however, move it up a month to July, so as not to coincide with Katrina’s anniversary, which was yesterday.

That a conclave on mixed drinks should be held in New Orleans is only natural. The city is home to dozens of historic and atmospheric bars, and gave birth to enduring concoctions such as the Hurricane and the Sazerac. Some theorize that the word cocktail was derived from a New Orleans pharmacist named Antoine Amedee Peychaud, who in the late 18th century invented a restorative of brandy, absinthe, and bitters and served it in a tiny French egg-cup called a “coquetier.” (You might recognize Peychaud from the brand of bitters that bears his name — a vital ingredient in a Sazerac.) In New Orleans, drinking — along with food and music — is not a vice-tinged pastime; it is culture, and worth preserving. A celebration of libations in a town still ringed by debris and ruin may seem a surreal gesture. But engendering joie de vivre has always been a vital priority for New Orleanians. The house may be gone, but the house party goes on.

Home base for the conference was the venerable Hotel Monteleone, where Truman Capote claimed he was born (he wasn’t). Tennessee Williams once tippled at the hotel’s famous Carousel Bar, which makes a full revolution every 15 minutes. For the 2006 event, Ms. Rogers attracted 8,000 people, including absinthe obsessive Ted Breaux; “The King of Cocktails,” Dale DeGroff, who lectured on tequila; and the patter-trading vaudevillian team of Jared Brown and Anastasia Miller, who are so ardent about vodka they went all the way Norway to create their own.

The city was still staggering to its feet as the caucus got under way. The Napoleon House — situated in an 18th-century building and home of one of the city’s most bewitching drinks, the Pimm’s Cup — reopened the third day of the convention. Brennan’s, the famous restaurant on Royal Street, returned to life June 8, after replacing its floors and custom-size freezer. Irreplaceable was its 36,000-bottle wine cellar, every vintage cooked after the electricity failed during Katrina. Another landmark restaurant, Antoine’s, lost 30,000 bottles.

Both Napoleon House and Brennan’s struggled with a city-wide lack of available staff, resulting in slower than normal service and shortened hours at many restaurants. At a lunch event at Brennan’s, a former Times-Picayune staffer named Betty Guillard — who eats Bananas Foster (a Brennan’s invention) every day for breakfast and whose card identifies her as a “Bon Vivant” — told how, when the high-end, Italian-Creole restaurant Bacco first reopened, her dinner was served on paper plates.

Also open was one of the most famous bars on Bourbon Street, Jean LaFitte’s Old Absinthe House. Absinthe is no longer served there, but Ted Breaux poured it at his popular seminar on the infamous drink. Attendees hugged the walls, curious to taste the Paris potion once demonized and/or romanticized by everyone from Edgar Degas to Oscar Wilde. (The stuff is still against the law in America. The European Union legalized it in 1998, after a near century-long ban.)

Mr. Breaux, a New Orleans native, has gone to considerable lengths to dispel the myths surrounding the green, wormwood-based liquor he describes as “liquid springtime.”Through his own studies, he proved that absinthe’s reputation as a maddening elixir is owed to the shoddy ingredients and distilling practices of disreputable manufacturers cashing in on the absinthe craze. Another culprit was the misinformation spread by unscrupulous wine producers looking to chip away at the green goddess’s market. He also established that in properly brewed absinthe, there are only traces of the toxin thujone, the element of wormwood that scientists long pinpointed as being the drink’s mind-altering component. Mr. Breaux now makes his own absinthe in France’s Loire Valley in stills used to brew the stuff during its peak in popularity in the late 19th century. Featuring an iron galley created by Gustav Eiffel, the distillery has been designated a museum by the French government.

At the class, Mr. Breaux displayed a beautiful antique absinthe fountain from his once-extensive collection. Much of his paraphernalia and old library were lost when his home filled with seven feet of water. As Mr. Breaux put it, they were “Katrina-ized.”

What Ted Breaux is to absinth, Jared Brown and Anastasia Miller are to vodka; that is, a little obsessed. The couple ran a seminar about the currently trendy spirit that they will argue to the death is not colorless, odorless, and tasteless. After a history lesson that included chapters on the Moscow Mule, the Bloody Mary, and the Screwdriver — all fairly modern inventions that reversed the fortunes of the once obscure “ethnic” alcohol — they led the crowd through a tasting. This taste test was a little stacked, since one of the three vodkas featured was Mr. Brown and Ms. Miller’s own Heavy Water, a concoction born in Norway. The creamy, cocoa-scented vodka proved to be the favorite of the audience — a frustrating result since the crowd was then informed that the vodka is still very hard to find in America.

Mr. Brown and Ms. Miller also led the final event of the weekend, a “Bubbly Brunch” at Arnaud’s. A meal of Creole cream cheese Evangeline, Shrimp Clemenceau, and crème brûlée was accompanied by a French 75, Nelson’s Blood, and a Champagne Cocktail. “The proportions of all Champagne cocktails are the same,” Ms. Miller explained. “Add one once of whatever, then pour in Champagne.”

At the end of her Champagne demonstration, Ms. Miller, resting her feet and mind, sat down to a Champagne cocktail. She and Mr. Brown had officiated several events at “Tales of the Cocktail” and were due to fly to France that afternoon. Staring at an Angostura-stained sugar cube as it dissolved at the bottom of her flute, she noted that 2006 was the 200th anniversary of the word “cocktail” appearing in print.

She also expressed concern over the future of the Museum of the American Cocktail. She is one of the founders of the museum, which opened in a corner of the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum on Royal Street in January 2005. The museum’s president, Mr. DeGroff, had found a permanent space for the new institution just before Katrina hit.

After the hurricane, Mr. DeGroff drove into the city and loaded up the collection in his van. “You felt you were on an island, surrounded by nothing,” he said. The museum now has exhibits at the Commander’s Palace in Las Vegas, courtesy of the Brennan family, which owns the restaurant. But Mr. DeGroff wants to bring it home to Crescent City — where the original Commander’s Palace remains closed. “New Orleans has such a rich drinking history,” he said. “We don’t want to abandon it.”