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
The venerable – unavoidable, even – Oz Clarke continues to grind out book after book, and this almost-coffee-table-sized tome is designed to make wine accessible to even the most rank novice. If you know nothing, you’ll probably get sucked in by the pictures of strawberries and chocolate, part of Clarke’s goal to get you thinking…
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For a book purporting to be the “ultimate” wine companion, this tome is awfully slim. No judgments, really, but anything claiming “ultimate” status always makes me wonder about where a writer’s bar of excellence may lie. Like the previously reviewed Whiskypedia, The Ultimate Wine Companion is not the work of one writer but rather a…
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It is try that whiskey has a tendency to make philosophers out of all of us, but I didn’t know that would lead anyone to actually write a book on the topic. Truth be told, Whiskey & Philosophy is not really a study of drinking dogma but an anthology (written by 20 different authors or…
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The beauty of books about whiskey (vs. books about wine) is that they needn’t be replaced quite so often with new ones. Compared to the wine world, the whiskey world is relatively plodding in speed, and the Black Label you drink today is going to taste and be made an awful lot like the Black…
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Subtitled “99 Ways to Feel 100 Times Better,” this slim tome (just 99 pages long including the index) is a straightforward list of recipes and advice for correcting the worst part of drinking: the hangover. The advice is split into three sections – before, during, and after you drink – and the advice varies from…
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Need to bone up on the wines of Greece and Hungary? Can’t keep straight the various styles of Madeira? Desire a greater understanding of the production of various ciders? You need The Sommelier Prep Course: An Introduction to the Wines, Beers, and Spirits of the World. As the name might imply, wine is the focus…
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I love the idea of Japanese Cocktails, the look of it, and the author Yuri Kato, who has obviously toiled for some long months to come up with a succinct list of Japanese-inspired cocktails that you won’t find in any other cocktail recipe guide. And therein lies the problem with Japanese Cocktails: Unless you have…
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There are two major schools of thoughts in whiskey review compendiums: You can get Jim Murray’s Whiskey Bible, which features digest reviews of every whiskey known to man in birdseed type, or you can go for Michael Jackson’s less thorough (and covering single malt Scotch only) Complete Guide to Single Malt Scotch, which features quite…
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What a strange little tome we have here. All business, this book claims to offer “a recipe for every drink known–including tricks and games to impress your guests.” Do professional bartenders engage in tricks and games? For most that I know, scowling is as close as they get to anything approaching a tabletop diversion. The…
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The venerable Oz Clarke is back again with another pocket-sized guide to the entire world of wine. Naturally it’s impossible to distill everything into 350 minuscule pages, and as always it’s easier to see what Clarke has left out than what he’s decided to include in his annual guide. Organized like a dictionary, everything’s alphabetical,…
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