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
If Esquire had come up with something better than its carrot-juice-doctored bottled Manhattan for its first ready-to-drink cocktail, I might be more willing to go along with the subtitle that this is “the only cocktail guide anyone really needs.” But Esquire has always been long on hyperbole, so it’s hard to fault it here. Drink Like a Man,…
Patrick Dawson’s Beer Geek Handbook is a kooky, breezy look at the often nutty world of beer – with the self-described “beer geek” squarely in mind. Extensively illustrated by Greg Kletsel, it covers the basics of beer, while tiptoeing into the rarified air of the Great American Beer Festival, beer trading, whether collaborative brews are…
With The New Cocktail Hour, Andre and Tenaya Darlington take a freshness-first approach to the cocktail trade, with the goal of “blurring the line between the bar and the kitchen.” That means: Expect lots of classic cocktails and a smattering of originals that make as much use of fresh fruit, herbs, and homemade syrups as possible.…
There’s a certain segment of the population — Californians interested in craft distilling — that will find Distilled Stories particularly appealing. That isn’t to say the rest of you won’t dig the book, but there’s a certain down-the-rabbit-hole inquisitiveness that’s required of anyone wishing to drill down into this somewhat obscure world. Distilled Stories takes the…
Ever wonder how Jim Koch got Samuel Adams started? Now you can, in Koch’s memoir that is part business story, part insider guide to the booze trade. It’s a relatively straightforward work as Koch meanders from his first act as a management consultant to the founder of a scrappy brewing operation to the CEO of…
The tagline for ReMixology, by Michael Turback and Julia Hastings-Black, is a bit of a misnomer. This is a recipe book that doesn’t reinvent classic cocktails so much as it uses them as inspiration for updated drinks. The standards are all presented as exactly that — the margarita, Manhattan, and other classics are all described with…
Old timey cocktails are back, and so are old timey cocktail books. While cheap paperback reprints have been rampant in recent years, now these out of print tomes (originals can run up to $700 on Amazon) are being remade with fancy hardcovers and all the original detailing intact. Here’s a look at three, all recently republished…
Writer Jeff Cioletti wants you to put down the Budweiser and the shot of JD. “Drinking adventurously” means exploring the vast array of beverages the world has to offer, and Cioletti guides you through 52 of them in a guidebook that is meant to be consumed one chapter (and type of drink) each week. Cioletti…
Mark Bitterman sure does like bitters, and if you want to learn how to make them, to craft cool cocktails with them, or even cook with them (bittered southern fried chicken, anyone?), this new book is for you. A true field guide in appearance — softbound with a rubberized cover — the book feels a…
Novelty cocktail books are a dime a dozen, but Scott Deitche’s focus on the drinks of private eyes, gangsters, and other “in the shadows” types at least offers the promise of something new — of cocktail stories that we haven’t heard many times before. Alas, this slim tome unfortunately is a bit of a random…