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
Burnt out on brewing pilsners, lagers, and IPAs? Check out Drew Beechum and Denny Conn’s book Experimental Homebrewing, an oversized tome that uses as its apparent thesis that anything in your kitchen can be used to make beer. Cilantro? Mushrooms? Peanut butter? You’ll need to get up earlier in the morning than that to stump this duo.…
Scotland is a magical place, and descriptions and tasting notes really don’t do it justice. If you’re a whisky fan and can’t visit in person, the next best thing is here: Charles MacLean’s Spirit of Place, with photos by Lara Platman and Allan MacDonald. The book is a beautiful coffee table tome, with almost 300 pages…
Am I the only one who doesn’t like drinking out of a mason jar? Yeah, it looks old-timey and all, but the fat lip and groove for the lid always seems to make things sloppy. That said, for the kinds of cocktails in The Mason Jar Cocktail Companion, by Shane Carley, this kind of delivery mechanism should…
Homebrew is a neat idea, but who has the time to make it? That’s the thesis of Mary Izett’s Speed Brewing, a book which provides exactly the type of instruction that you think it’s going to offer. While the back cover promises you can make a “session IPA” in just a few hours, Izett’s how-to has…
Cocktail party? OK. Craft cocktail party? Even better! Julie Reiner’s big, hardbound book takes the now-popular seasonal approach to organization, dropping a couple dozen recipes into each of the four seasons. Reiner, owner of the Clover Club in Brooklyn and the Flatiron Lounge in Manhattan, keeps things fairly simple — most of the cocktails only…
A cynical beer drinker would say the concept of the new book Beer for All Seasons: A Through-the-Year Guide to What do Drink and When to Drink It is absurd. Beer should be drunk every day, amirite beer guys? Well, author Randy Mosher of course has more sophisticated aims here: Pairing certain beer styles to certain…
Shaking Up Prohibition in New Orleans: Authentic Vintage Cocktails from A to Z is a cocktail book that needs significant introduction to be understood. Written in the 1920s by two New Orleans suffragettes, Olive Leonhardt and Hilda Hammond, the manuscript was recently unearthed by Gay Leonhardt, a descendant of Olive’s. The book is tied to the alphabet,…
Hey Matthew Latkiewicz — if that is your real name! — who are you to tell me I suck at drinking! Oh, you write for McSweeney’s. I suppose that gives you some McThority on the topic of the proper treatment of hooch and hooch consumption. Kidding around aside — which is hard to do when discussing…
If you’re a rank novice when it comes to wine — I mean, you really know absolutely nothing — then Jackson Meyer’s primer, The Book of Wine, is as good a place as any to start — short of dropping in on your local wine bar, that is. In a breezy 220 pages, Meyer covers, as…
Lew Bryson must be some kind of spirit whisperer. He knows seemingly everything about the whiskey world, and — more importantly — he has managed to distill (ha!) it down to fully readable, understandable essentials with this impressive tome, Tasting Whiskey. As the title implies, Bryson is here to be your insider guide to this often…