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
Catherine Fallis, Master Sommelier, is a respected colleague and a fixture at San Francisco wine events whom I encounter with regularity. That makes it somewhat difficult to write about her new book, Ten Grapes to Know: The Ten & Done Wine Guide, but I’ll endeavor to be as impartial as possible here. As the name suggests, Ten…
Mark Addison’s Cocktail Chameleon certainly spares no expense in its presentation. Clothbound, oversized, and filled with glossy pages and loads of full-color photos, it looks absolutely marvelous. The concept of the book is to take 12 classic cocktails and provide 12 twists on each, for a total of 144 variations on a dozen themes. Take the…
Drinking with Saint Nick: Christmas Cocktails for Sinners and Saints is a natural idea for a seasonal cocktail guide: Collect holiday-appropriate recipes and bundle them into one, Christmas-friendly tome. Note that does not mean that Michael P. Foley stuffs this book with peppermint-flavored cocktails, mulled wine, and eggnog variants — though all three make appearances…
Not everyone drinks alcohol. Not everyone who drinks alcohol wants to drink alcohol all the time. Nothing wrong with that, but sipping on club soda with lime is an uncommon bummer that it ought to be illegal. Whether you’re entertaining a teetotaler (or someone underage) or are simply trying to drink less, elevating your alcohol-free…
Approaching anything in 2018 with the word “hack” in it (present URL excepted) is grounds for a raised eyebrow and a healthy dose of skepticism. The term has been transformed into a catch-all susceptible to excessive usage, or blatant misuse. While Ben Robinson’s Beer Hacks comes close to toeing the line a few times, it does…
There are plenty of wine books out there, and a smaller, yet not insignificant, number of books on beer. Spirits books, mostly focusing on the recent whiskey craze, seem to hit the shelves every other week. Few authors, however, attempt to cover all types of alcohol, much less place it in the context of recorded…
Richard L. Chilton, Jr.’s book Adventures with Old Vines, is, in no uncertain terms, a book of vintage charts. “Vineyard Profiles,” rather, as the book puts it. From page 53 to 269 (the end of the book), Chilton — who owns and operates Napa’s Hourglass Winery — runs through a collection of wine producers, painting a portrait…
John Schlimm’s name can usually be found affixed to vegan cookbooks or impressive tomes about beer. Allowing for the direct family connection between the distilling of beer and moonshine, it makes sense his next endeavor would venture deep into the Americana lore of the white devil. So much has been written on the subject of…
It takes a certain type of attitude to appreciate Mike Veseth’s Around the World in Eighty Wines, a personal exploration into wine that vaguely follows the conceit of Around the World in Eighty Days. Er, sort of. His general idea: Can we identify 80 wines that represent the entirety of the wine world, going region by region,…
Let’s face it. Japan is a fascinating place, and so, too, Japanese whisky. As the popularity of the latter continues to skyrocket, more and more books on the subject are hitting the shelves (as evidence, see our last book review). Well-known spirits author Dave Broom was an expert on Japanese whisky long before it became…