The Best Bartending Books
Whether it’s a lack of money or an excess of agoraphobia, you’ve decided to start making more cocktails at home. But there are so very many recipe books on the market. Which do you choose, and do you really need them at all, now that everything is online?
The problem with online drink databases is that they have thousands of recipes, and most of them are just plain awful. They recipes come from many different sources, so you end up with 17 bad recipes for the Martini when you’re only looking for one good one. Also, to make the drinks you end up running back and forth between the computer where the recipes is and the kitchen where the ingredients are.
When it comes to collections of recipes, I say less is more. A book with 10,000 drink recipes in it will likely have 9500 that you’d never try. Even the classic, 1500-drink Mr. Boston Official Bartender’s Guide was pretty lousy with bad cocktails until this year’s makeover that eliminated a lot of the calls for pre-mixes like Collins mix and sour mix. That book is a good bartender’s quick reference, but if you want and the Master’s level study on bartending pick up Gary Regan’s very detailed The Joy of Mixology.
I open Regan’s book when I have a nerdy drink question, but not when I’m whipping up something tasty for happy hour. For that, most often I turn to Dale DeGroff’s The Essential Cocktail. It has all the classic recipes you’ll need. But if I’m feeling in the mood for experimentation with new drinks, I’ll pick up Robert Hess’s The Essential Bartender’s Guide (it’s not, but the recipes are good) or the inspiring The Art of the Bar by Jeff Hollinger and Rob Schwartz. That book will make you realize the kitchen and the bar are not so different- you’re just cooking with liquids instead of solids.
If you love a particular spirit, you can just skip the rest of the recipes and go for a specialty book. W. Park Kerr’s Viva Vodka is nice, as is Joanne Weir’s Tequila, Kim Haasarud’s 101 Champagne Cocktails, and Jeff “Beachbum” Berry’s Sippin’ Safari for rum.
You can also find many of Beachbum’s recipes on an iPhone application, called Tiki+. It was developed by the same people behind great historical cocktail recipe app called Cocktails+. Gary Regan, cited above, released the app Flip N Drink with classic and modern recipes combined.
The great thing about these drink applications is most of them offer only as many recipes as you’ll find in a book, rather than the tens of thousands you’ll find online. This is certainly useful when you’re out at a bar and forget a recipe, but I still find myself reaching for the hard copy instead of my phone at home. Not only do I like all the extra information about glassware and mixing technique you get from the books, I also strongly dislike getting my phone all sticky when trying to hold it and shake a drink at the same time.
The Mixer Mix-up
Much as I love the name, I can’t bring myself to consume what the kids today are calling the Skinny Bitch. This cocktail is usually made with a flavored vodka, Diet Coke, and a squeeze of lime. My issue with the drink doesn’t involve the liquor, but with the artificially flavored and sweetened soda.
But the Skinny Bitch is not really a drink focused on the Coke; it’s a drink focused on the Diet. Also focusing on the diet is a writer named Teresa Marie Howes, who wrote a whole book on diet drinks this year called Skinnytinis. Most of the recipes in the book cut calories in cocktails by adjusting the amounts of liqueurs and mixers, as distilled spirits like gin and vodka all have about the same number of calories per volume. Her drinks call for light or diet juices and sodas, and flavored water and other mixers instead of sugar-laden liqueurs in recipes. She makes crafty placements like swapping out the orange liqueur in a Margarita with light orange juice and Sweet ‘N Low.
One set of mixers that are often mixed up are soda water and tonic water. They both have water in the name so you can understand the confusion, but the two are vastly different liquids. Soda water is carbonated water, and mixes well with vodka. (Gin not so much.) Tonic water pairs well with more spirits, and is consumed in different countries with vodka, gin, rum, tequila, and even Port wine.
But tonic began as a tonic - a medicine used to prevent and cure malaria. It gets its flavor from the very bitter quinine that was once harvested from the bark of the cinchona tree, nicknamed the “fever tree” as it cured the malarial fever. To make the powdered bark palatable, explorers and soldiers in mosquito-intense countries around the world added sugar to the solution. Later, gin was added and the G&T was born. Hooray for medicine!
The important thing to note in that last paragraph is the use of sugar. Its presence (or more commonly, the presence of high fructose corn syrup) in drinks means it has those calories you’ve been trying to avoid. Many people think they’re sipping a diet drink when they choose tonic water, but really they may as well be swilling cola.
Now that I’m a fully functioning cocktail snob, I don’t drink the tonic water, sodas and juices that come out of the cocktail squirter in bars at all. I like fresh juices and mixers without artificial sweeteners - and it turns out these typically have less calories than do the sugared-up cranberry juice and sodas you’ll get in most bars anyway. At home, you can buy high quality mixers with natural and organic sweeteners for your cocktails. Out at the clubs though, you probably won’t have that option, so you can opt for diet soda or soda water as mixers. Or better yet, opt for that sugar-laden Apple-Cosmo-Choco-Tini at the bar, and then spend the night working off those calories on the dancefloor.
Camper English is a cocktails and spirits writer and publisher of Alcademics.com.
