“When I was growing up that was the stuff your mom wanted you to stay away from,” he says. “Now it’s hip—like Paris Hilton hip.” The bottles are listed at $5, compared with $100 or more for his best wines.

Malt liquor, a highly alcoholic brew, has long come under criticism as an inexpensive and inferior beer that big marketers use to attract inner-city drinkers. It typically comes in fat, 40-ounce bottles—“forties”—compared to standard 12-ounce bottles, and can have an alcohol content of as much as 8% compared with the usual 4% or 5%. Mickey’s, which has 5.6% alcohol and is made by Miller Brewing, is one of the most widely sold malt liquors. It typically costs about $3 for a 40-ounce bottle.

But in a few places across the country, malt liquor is having something of a cultural moment. It’s showing up on the menus of popular restaurants like Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack in San Francisco, where Mickey’s is served in an ice-filled champagne bucket.

Dick Cantwell, head brewer at Elysian Brewing Co., microbrewery in Seattle, occasionally makes a malt liquor called AK-47 and served it on tap. A T-shirt bearing the beer’s name and a silhouette of the assault rifle is far and away his best-selling shirt, he says.

Some alcohol-industry watchdogs and community activists label malt liquor “liquid crack.” Yet in spite of the outrage—or perhaps because of it—malt liquor has been celebrated in hip-hop lyrics and in movies like last year’s “Soul Plane” (the flight attendants have forties on the drink cart). It also has become popular on college campuses. Representatives of Miller and Anheuser-Busch say that malt liquor is sold in stores across the country and not just in inner cities.

Alfred Powell, an adjunct social welfare professor at New York’s Stony Brook University, says the new malt liquors and their tongue-in-cheek marketing are just as harmful. “It bothers me,” he says. “If you’re making fun of something that was devastating to a community at one time—and still is—you’re not helping.”

Malt liquor dates to at least the 1930s and was originally marketed as an upscale beer with the attributes of champagne, according to Kihm Winship, who recently wrote a history of malt liquor in All About Beer magazine. Early brands included Country Club, University Club and Sparkling State. It got a big push after World War II: Years of grain rationing during the war had necessitated the production of lower-alcohol beer, and brewers were eager to lure drinkers with new products that marked a return to prewar strength.

Around the 1960s, however, the marketing shifted as beer companies discovered malt liquor was being consumed mostly in inner-city communities. Labels began to emphasize the drink’s extra kick. Within the next few decades, brewers introduced brands such as Big Bear, King Cobra and Colt 45, which was made famous by advertisements featuring actor Billy Dee Williams and the slogan “It works every time.” In the early 1990s, under criticism, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives pulled bottles of Power Master off shelves because the name suggested the beer was an easy way to get drunk.