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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
While I was pleasantly surprised to find that the recent Complete Idiot’s Guide to Wine Basics was a credible and well-written introductory guide to the world of wine, another book from the Idiot’s series unfortunately bears little similarity. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Bartending, by Amy Zavatto, boasts 1,500 recipes on its cover, but sheer…
Author and mixologist Dale Degroff was in town recently to promote his new book, The Essential Cocktail, and while I sadly missed the promotional soiree, I did at least get a copy of the book to check out. All in all this is an excellent and accessible introduction to classic cocktails and their newer variants.…
I never would have thought I’d be recommending a book about wine with the phrase “complete idiot” in the title, but for outright rank beginners, this tome by Tara Q. Thomas is an accessible way to get a bearing on a complicated subject. Primarily broken down by grape varietal (with a few chapters devoted to…