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
This mammoth tome — nearly 400 pages and over six pounds in heft — is a tome in two parts. The two parts celebrate the companionship of food and wine: Each section offers information about a Grand Cru Bordeaux winery, its production, grape varietals, and a bit of history, plus copious, gorgeous photographs of that…
Bartending books come in two varieties: Mammoth reference tomes and slim, whimsical dispatches that are fit mainly for browsing. The Perfect Drink for Every Occasion (updated from its original 2003 edition) is squarely in the latter camp, though that’s not a slight: It’s actually a pretty fun little book that, if nothing else, can help…
For some reason, I get a kick out of reading quotations, and I expect I’m not alone, explaining why so many books of quotes are on the market. Steven Kates turns to a natural topic – the bottle – for this themed book of musings, and for the most part it’s a solid one. Split…
Every wine drinker needs one (and only one) book like this: A magnificent, encyclopedia-sized tome that tells you everything you can possibly want to know about wine in a single book. Or tries to, anyway. As such a subject is basically unmasterable, the goal with a mega-book like this is to be as comprehensive as…
France is probably the most complicated wine region in the world, full of viticultural areas that not only are most consumers unable to locate on a map, but which they can’t even pronounce. The thick and unwieldy Bettane & Desseauve’s Guide to the Wines of France will be of little help to most drinkers, an…
This slim little novelty book from Robert Schnakenberg is as harmless as it is cute: A collection of “Old Man Drink” cocktail recipes, paired with photos of old codgers sitting on barstools and quotes condensing their wisdom into various aphorisms. Many of the drinks are indeed nothing that anyone under the age of 55 would…
This mixology manual from veteran writer Jordan Kaye and co-author Marshall Altier tries to spin the usual, tired, organized-by-spirit cocktail manual by taking its several dozen drinks – mostly classics, with just a handful of originals thrown in – and offering “The Right Drink for Every Situation.” Neat idea, and in Kaye and Altier’s world,…
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…
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…
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…