Books
Drinkhacker’s books category covers everything from the history of drink to cocktail recipe collections and more. Books are rated using the same letter grade scale as our beverage reviews.
Top Book Posts:
The Waldorf Astoria Bar Book
Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol
Japanese Whisky
Cork Dork
A few months ago, we reviewed Karl Raitz’s Bourbon’s Backroads: A Journey through Kentucky’s Distilling Landscape, which provides a thoroughly detailed and data-intensive look at the context during which bourbon came to fruition. Raitz made the hard stuff look effortless: weaving together a narrative involving transportation, government affairs, topography, geography, engineering, architecture, and nearly every…
Within the cocktail world over the last decade there has been an aggressive and endless nod to Prohibition/pre-Prohibition aesthetics for inspiration. This trend does not appear to be making an exit any time in the foreseeable future, which is unfortunate: there is no stone left unturned, no magical cocktail recipe or elixir which hasn’t seen…
There are lots of whiskey books out there. I think I saw an entire shelf full on my last visit to a bookstore. Despite that abundance, it’s hard to find a brand-specific book that drills down into the history of a particular distillery. David Jennings’s new tome, American Spirit: Wild Turkey Bourbon from Ripy to…
This is not the sort of book one gets for their father who just acquired a taste for bourbon. This is not the type of book for someone who believes Bulleit’s marketing narrative to be the quintessential bourbon bildungsroman. Karl Raitz’s Bourbon’s Backroads is a highly specialized, richly detailed look at industrial techniques, financial history,…
The world is collapsing. Most national economies are in shambles, or staring down the face of collapse. The main street of your childhood hometown is an endless row of empty shells filled with ghosts of commerce past and vacancy signs. Your spouse (or romantic partner) has run off to the Cayman Islands with a day trader…
In matters of sake, I tend to defer to our sake expert Stephen Allison. If Steve’s not around, author Jeff Cioletti can sub in, with his “Non-Traditional Guide to Japan’s Traditional Beverage” serving as a solid base of instruction for anyone trying to find their way through this complex category. Questions answered go far beyond…
Euan Ferguson’s Drink London: The 100 Best Bars and Pubs certainly seems to live up to its name. I’ve never been to any of these joints, but I can assure you when I get to town I’ll be carting this slim volume with me (or at least copious notes from it). Updated from its last version…
Looking for elevated cocktail recipes? You needn’t look past the title of Aliza Kelly Faragher’s The Mixology of Astrology to know you’re not getting it here. Still, it’s a quirky enough idea to at least merit a flip-through if you’re zodiacally inclined and wondering if there are cocktails that pair better with your star sign.…
A bar without music is a little like a martini without an olive — doable, but just not the same. In Booze and Vinyl, Andre and Tenaya Darlington don’t just make the case for combining music and drinking, they suggest firing up a listening party that pairs particular cocktails with classic vinyl albums. The idea of…
The Dead Rabbit is a famed bar in New York City, and like all famed bars the time has come for it to put out a book of cocktails. (Correction: This is their second book.) Naturally, as leaders in the craft cocktail space, owners Sean Muldoon and Jack McGarry (and bar manager Jillian Vose) couldn’t…