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
Arthur Shaprio is a legendary wine and spirits industry maven who has seen every trick in the booze industry marketing playbook. He is also the author of Booze Business, an exhaustive blog dissecting both the history and the current trends in the industry, and Inside the Bottle is his book. I should, perhaps, clarify: Inside the Bottle…
With all the hubbub over half-recanted price hikes of Booker’s Bourbon, it’s an inauspicious time to be releasing The Big Man of Jim Beam, a biography of the Beam distiller which Booker’s is named after: Booker Noe. Noe died in 2004, so this book, written by Jim Kokoris, is quite distanced from the man himself. And maybe…
The tagline promises this book will tell us “All that’s left to know about the world’s most celebrated adult beverage.” Based on the number of beer books I’ve read over the years, there can’t be much. But somehow writer Jeff Cioletti fills over 370 pages with this wisdom. The tagline is a bit of a…
Now that I’ve got my first homebrew under my belt, what’s next? Perhaps a spin through the Home Brew Recipe Bible: An Incredible Array of 101 Craft Beer Recipes, From Classic Styles to Experimental Wilds, will spur some ideas? Chris Colby’s tome isn’t so much a bible as it is an encyclopedia, a straightforward cookbook for…
If you missed the meteoric rise of Japanese whisky over the last 15 years, I hate to tell you this, but it’s too late to catch up. The very best of Japanese whiskies are simply no longer available, replaced by lower-end shadows of their former selves. If you can find a top shelf Japanese bottling,…
Look, our forefathers were not the most temperate bunch, and writer Steve Grasse endeavors to lay bare their improprieties in this rollicking exploration into the origins — literally — of American drinking culture. This is a book about drinking like none other I’ve seen, unless you’re the type of guy that likes to tipple on, say,…
With Drinks: A User’s Guide, writer Adam McDowell offers a primer on just about everything with alcohol in it. Highly skimmable but fairly surface-level from start to finish, the book is a melange of simple advice about drinking (don’t drink the wine at a wedding, go for spirits instead), angry instructions (don’t drink vodka), and (spanning…
Chris McMillian is one of the proprietors of New Orleans’ Museum of the American Cocktail, and with this book, he and writer Elizabeth M. Williams take a walking tour through the city and through time, to showcase where New Orleans’ essential libations came from. The book pulls no punches because it doesn’t throw any. It’s…
Fred Minnick may be best known for wearing an ascot, but he also happens to know whiskey, particularly bourbon. With Bourbon: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American Whiskey, Minnick takes us on a lively and wholly unpedantic history of bourbondom, particularly as it relates to its homeland of Kentucky. You will learn a lot…
Canon is a fun and well-stocked bar in Seattle — in fact, it lays claim to having the largest collection of spirits in the western hemisphere, and checking out the shelves that line the walls of the place, it’s hard to dispute that. Now, proprietor Jamie Boudreau, with James Fraioli, attempt to codify all the…