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.”