Winter Reading for Beginners
Recommended Reading
Drunken Botanist by Amy Steward
Imbibe by David Wondrich
Death & Company by Alex Day, David Kaplan, Nick Fauchald
Cocktail Codex by Alex Day, David Kaplan, Nick Fauchald
These books in our opinion are the best ones to up the ante on your cocktail game.
Mixology is essentially the creative side of bartending. It’s like having a degree in engineering with a focus on design - you have all the structure there from bartending, but now you’re getting creative with it and testing new spaces to see what works.
Drunken Botanist is one of Ariana’s personal favorite reference books. It teaches you where your greatest tool (spirit) is coming from and gives background on history and how it is made. The spirit in each bottle is made of something, and normally that something has roots that go back further than most people ever think about. We highly recommend purchasing a copy so you can refer to it for years to come, and you totally don’t have to read it cover to cover to get some really incredible information, but we did anyway.
What you’ll get from it: A comprehensive layout of how over 150 plants are used in the wonderful world of spirits. This will include technical stuff like genus and species and pollination process. It also will have history of when these plants first came into use as booze. It debunks myths and breaks down complexities like differences between the labels we see on whiskies, rums, and so much more.
Imbibe will give you the low down on the history of cocktails. It essentially highlights how cocktails came to be what they are today, which was truly a hell of a journey because most people who drink aren’t good at recording stuff.
What you’ll get from it: the history of bartending as a profession and the evolution of cocktails. Also don’t go crazy looking up all of the people mentioned in the book, the star of this show is Jerry Thomas.
Death & Company is the type of book that will hone your bartending skills. You’ll see that this book and Cocktail Codex have the same authors. Cocktail Codex is the intermediate mixology book where as Death & Co. is a bit more entry level.
We hope this list helps you on your path to cocktail mastery! Once you’ve conquered these books the limit does not exist on which spine to crack next.