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
Alt Whiskeys is a book that will be absolutely fascinating to many, but will be practical and actionable for only about 200 people. Why? Because for the vast majority of you, cooking the recipes in the book will be illegal. Very illegal, as author Darek Bell (of Corsair Distillery) notes. Five years in jail and…
For nearly three decades, essayist and author Lewis Lapham steered the good ship Harper’s as its editor-in-chief and figurehead. He stepped down from the masthead five years ago, and went on to establish a journal of history and ideas, Lapham’s Quarterly, tackling contemporary topics and placing them in a historical context. He calls on voices…
Spirits nerds love a good yarn about how such and such booze came into being, and with Iconic Spirits, Mark Spivak has put plenty of the best into one easy-reading tome. Curious how moonshining and NASCAR are inextricably intertwined (hint: it’s got nothing to do with the people watching it), or how St. Germain found…
PDT is a Manhattan speakeasy (behind a hot dog joint in the East Village) and is known for pushing high-quality cocktails. This thick cocktail recipe book covers all the bases of setting up a solid bar — right down to how to make your own grenadine — but the centerpiece is the cocktail list, which…
I’m the first one to agree with the concept of using alcohol — beer, wine, spirits — in your cooking, but a standalone cookbook devoted to boozing up otherwise average recipes is just a mistake from the start. This slim volume goes for kitsch, with dishes like “Sassy Salmon in Champagne Sauce,” “Vini Vidi Vici…
Joshua M. Bernstein is a fountain of beer-centric knowledge, and if you found yourself sitting next to him at the bar you’d probably get your ears filled with talk of saisons, cask ales, and Berliner weisses. Brewed Awakening, subtitled Behind the Beers and Brewers Leading the World’s Craft Brewing Revolution, is well-written in an engaging…
For those not in the know, M.F.K. Fisher is sort of like what Julia Child might have been had she decided to eat out for every meal. A prolific writer who produced dozens of books and countless magazine articles about food from the 1930s to the 1980s, Fisher loved to eat and drink, but more…
When I cracked open this tome, subtitled 50 Recipes that Celebrate the Craft of Mixing Drinks from Coast to Coast, I was expecting another treatise on classic cocktails through the ages, maybe separated by regions of popularity: Margaritas and daiquiris in the south, Manhattans and martinis up north. What I missed was that the book…
Amanada Hallay’s Vintage Cocktails: Retro Recipes for the Home Mixologist takes advantage of the classic cocktail resurgent, presenting a solid 70 or so cocktails, all of which you’ve likely had once or at least read about in a cocktail recipe book and dismissed as sounding like swill. There’s plenty of classic stuff in this book…
I’m not sure why anthologies are so popular in the wine and spirits space. Maybe it’s because people get too soused up while writing and can only finish a few pages before dozing off at the computer. Barrels & Drams: The History of Whisk(e)y in Jiggers and Shots, edited by William M. Dowd, isn’t very…