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
Jean-Charles Boisset is an almost ludicrously charming bon vivant whose winery holdings include Buena Vista, Raymond, JCB, and more. In Passion For Wine: The French Ideal and the American Dream, Boisset joins forces with writer and Boisset ambassador Marnie Old to produce a coffee table-styled tome designed to offer a somewhat unique perspective on the world…
Annette Joseph clearly loves Italy, but her book Cocktail Italiano isn’t just about drinking your way across the country. In fact, to be honest, cocktails occupy comparably few of the pages here. Most of the book — dense with full-color photography and divided into 12 chapters, each for one city or region along the Italian…
There are lots of bourbon books out there but none quite like Brian Haara’s Bourbon Justice. This history of America’s native spirit takes bourbon geeking to new heights, and I mean that in a good way. Plenty of books will give you a history of bourbon, recounting the many embellished stories and tall tales that have…
Did you know you can make wine from store-bought raisins? Tomatoes? Butternut squash? The very thought of drinking many of the wines in Richard Bender’s Wild Winemaking (aka Wild Wine Making) are alone worth the price of admission, even though I will fully confess I don’t plan on actually whipping up any plum champagne or limequat-kung…
Like Fred Minnick, Richard Carleton Hacker is one of those names you eventually start to see everywhere when you spend much time in the booze business. He writes for a bunch of magazines about wine and spirits and has branded himself a “cigar czar” and “the most politically incorrect author in America,” which is tough…
First off, to clear up any early and obvious confusion, Julep is not a book about mint juleps (not entirely, anyway). Julep is a bar in Houston, Texas — a great one, at that! — that, as the subtitle for this book indicates, focuses to some degree on the cocktails of the South. Julep is…
Craft cocktail books are wonderful to flip through, but they invariably call for such obscure spirits that I rarely end up actually up making them. For the typical home mixologist, such concoctions rarely wind up as anything beyond aspirational. Maggie Hoffman offers a solution of sorts in The One-Bottle Cocktail, a compendium of 83 drinks that…
Ever wonder how they drink in Panama? Finland? West Africa? Jeff Cioletti’s book The Drinkable Globe: The Indispensable Guide to the Wide World of Booze is the atlas you never knew you needed, a surprisingly thick guidebook that takes you on a fairly deep dive into spirits both familiar and wholly obscure. The book is…
Kevin Zraly is a legend in wine education, and here with coauthors Mike DeSimone and Jeff Jenssen he aims to dissect the world of red wine, clipping it into 50 “essential” varieties and styles. Organizationally, it couldn’t be simpler: Specifically, the book takes you through an alphabetical glossary of 41 grape varietals, then 9 styles (most…
With mezcal on the rise as a category, it makes sense for enthusiasts to build their understanding of what mezcal is and why it’s such a unique product in the world of spritis. Tom Bullock’s treatise, The Mezcal Experience: A Field Guide to the World’s Best Mezcals and Agave Spirits, offers a solid foundation to the…