See what sets this cousin of tequila apart from the rest of the pack. Produced in Mexico for centuries but little known elsewhere until recent years, mezcal has captured the imagination of spirits enthusiasts with its astonishing complexities. And while big liquor is beginning to jump aboard the bandwagon, most mezcal is still artisanal in nature, produced using small-batch techniques handed down for generations, often with agave plants harvested in the wild. ​Join author Emma Janzen through Mezcal as she presents an engaging primer on all things related to the spirit; its long history, the craft of distilling it, and a thorough guide to many of the most common agaves used in production and how they shape the resulting spirit. In addition, top mezcal bars across the United States and Mexico contribute a selection of nearly fifty cocktails that accentuate its distinguishing qualities.Beautifully produced and authoritatively written, Mezcal is the definitive guide to exploring and unraveling the mysteries of this extraordinary handcrafted spirit. An Editors’ Pick for Amazon Best Books of the month of July 2017.

    This indispensable guide breaks down bartending into bar essential techniques, and then applies them to building the best drinks.Over 60 of the best drink recipes: The Bar Book contains more than 60 cocktail recipes that employ the techniques you will learn in this craft cocktail book. Each technique is illustrated with how-to photography to provide inspiration and guidance.Bartending and mixology techniques include the best practices for:JuicingGarnishingCarbonatingStirring and shakingChoosing the correct ice for proper chilling and dilution of a drinkAnd, much moreIf you found PTD Cocktail Book, 12 Bottle Bar, The Joy of Mixology, Death and Co., and Liquid Intelligence to be helpful among bartending and mixology books, you will find Jeffrey Morgenthaler's The Bar Book to be an essential bartender book.

    Named Best Bar in America by Esquire, Canon received Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards for World's Best Drinks Selection (2013) and World's Best Spirits Selection (2015), and Drinks International included it on their prestigious World's 50 Best Bars list. In his debut, legendary bartender and Canon founder Jamie Boudreau offers 100 cocktail recipes ranging from riffs on the classics, like the Cobbler’s Dream and Corpse Reviver, to their lineup of original house drinks, such as the Truffled Old Fashioned and the Banksy Sour. In addition to tips, recipes, and formulas for top-notch cocktails, syrups, and infusions, Boudreau breaks down the fundamentals and challenges of opening and running a bar—from business plans to menu creation. The Canon Cocktail Book is poised to be an essential drinks manual for both the at-home cocktail enthusiast and bar industry professional.

    But how does a beginning cook become good, a good cook great?Modeled on Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, The Elements of Cooking is an opinionated volume by Michael Ruhlman—the award-winning and bestselling author of The Making of a Chef and coauthor of The French Laundry Cookbook—that pares the essentials of good cooking into a slim, easy-to-take-anywhere book. It will also stand alongside a handful of classics of the kitchen, just as Strunk and White's book sits on the desk of every writer and every English student. Not only does this book deconstruct the essential knowledge of the kitchen, it also takes what every professional chef knows instinctively after years of training and experience and offers it up cleanly and brilliantly to the home cook. With hundreds of entries from acid to zester, here is all the information—no more and no less—you need to cook, as well as countless tips (including only one recipe in the entire book, for the “magic elixir of the kitchen”) and no-nonsense advice on how to be a great cook. You'll learn to cook everything, as the entries cover all the key moves you need to make in the kitchen and teach you, for example, not only what goes into a great sauce but how to think about it to make it great. Eight short, beautifully written essays outline what it takes not merely to cook but to cook well: understanding heat, using the right tools (there are only five of them), cooking with eggs, making stock, making sauce, salting food, what a cook should read, and exploring the elusive, most important skill to have in the kitchen, finesse.

    An epicenter of this barroom artistry can be found at the Absinthe Brasserie & Bar in San Francisco, the city that spends more money per capita on alcohol than any other in the country.Bartenders Jeff Hollinger and Bob Schwartz share their artisanal approach for stunning creations that unveil a new spectrum of flavors. Fresh herbs and even aromatic lavender are deftly used to augment classic and new cocktail recipes. Syrups and mixes are carefully crafted from scratch, ensuring small-batch perfection and a harmony of flavors. Hollinger and Schwartz also share the colorful anecdotes behind the 21 Hayes, Ginger Rogers, and other signature cocktails created at Absinthe.Acclaimed photographer Frankie Frankeny captures their virtuoso mixing performances with a refreshing take on the cocktail, creating a showpiece for any living room.

     Beer might seem as American as baseball, but that has not always been true: Rum and whiskey were the drinks of choice in the 1840s, with only a few breweries making heavy, yeasty English ale. When a wave of German immigrants arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century, they promptly set about re-creating the pleasures of the biergartens they had left behind. Just fifty years later, the American-style lager beer they invented was the nation’s most popular beverage—and brewing was the nation’s fifth-largest industry, ruled over by fabulously wealthy titans Frederick Pabst and Adolphus Busch. But when anti-German sentiments aroused by World War I fed the flames of the temperance movement (one activist even declared that “the worst of all our German enemies are Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, and Miller”), Prohibition was the result. In the wake of its repeal, brewers replaced flavor with innovations like marketing and lite beer, setting the stage for a generation of microbrewers whose ambitions reshaped the drink. Grab a glass and settle in for the surprising story behind your favorite pint.

    Jeff Berry (or 'Beachbum Berry', as he is better known), is America's leading authority on tropical drinks and polynesian pop culture. In this all-new book, Berry not only offers up tantilizing new drink recipes, but tells stories about some of the most famous figures of their time. The Bum applies the same dogged research to the untold stories of the people behind the drinks. Stories culled from over 100 interviews with those who actually created the mid-century tiki scene - people as colorful as the drinks they invented, or served, or simply drank. People like: Leon Lontoc, Don The Beachcomber's waiter who served Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando by night and acted in their movies by day; Henry Riddle, the Malibu Seacomber bartender who fed items about his famous customers to infamous gossip columnist Louella Parsons, till the day Howard Hughes found him out; and Duke Kamanamoku, whose manager turned him from Olympic champion into reluctant restaurateur.

    In doing so, he codified the concoctions that have become the backbone of high-end bars around the world! Often lauded as the father of mixology, Jerry Thomas, in addition to penning this book (the first drink book ever published in America), popularized inventive drinks and elevated the practice of bartending to an art form. At the height of his popularity in the 19th Century, people all over the country were eager to taste Thomas' recipes. While serving as the principle bartender at the Occidental Hotel in San Francisco he earned more money per week than the Vice President of the United States! Perhaps most famous for his signature cocktail, the Blue Blazer, which involves pouring flaming whiskey between two glasses to create a dramatic pyrotechnic display, Jerry Thomas laid the foundations for today's cocktail renaissance while Abraham Lincoln was still in the White House.

    

    More recently, expensive “Super Tuscans” have been the rage. But between these extremes lay a bounty of delicious, moderately priced wines that belong in every wine drinker’s repertoire.Vino Italiano is the only comprehensive and authoritative American guide to the wines of Italy. It surveys the country’s wine-producing regions; identifies key wine styles, producers, and vintages; and offers delicious regional recipes. Extensive reference materials—on Italy’s 300 growing zones, 361 authorized grape varieties, and 200 of the top producers— provide essential information for restaurateurs and wine merchants, as well as for wine enthusiasts.Beautifully illustrated as well as informative, Vino Italiano is the perfect invitation to the Italian wine experience.

    It tastes great. It’s egg free (and thus safe to eat raw). You can whip it up in minutes. And, best of all, you can use it to make dozens of delicious cookie dough creations, from cakes, custards, and pies to candies, brownies, and even granola bars. Included are recipes for indulgent breakfasts (cookie dough doughnuts!), frozen treats (cookie dough popsicles!), outrageous snacks (cookie dough wontons! cookie dough fudge! cookie dough pizza!), and more.The Cookie Dough Lover’s Cookbook features clear instructions and dozens of decadent full-color photographs. If you’ve ever been caught with a finger in the mixing bowl, then this is the book for you!

    

    (By the way, the short answer is no.) A unique blend of travelogue, spirits history, and recipe collection, Boozehound explores the origins of what we drink and the often surprising reasons behind our choices.  In lieu of odorless, colorless, tasteless spirits, Wilson champions Old World liquors with hard-to-define flavors—a bitter and complex Italian amari, or the ancient, aromatic herbs of Chartreuse, as well as distinctive New World offerings like lively Peruvian pisco. With an eye for adventure, Wilson seeks out visceral experiences at the source of production—visiting fields of spiky agave in Jalisco, entering the heavily and reverently-guarded Jägermeister herb room in Wolfenbüttel, and journeying to the French Alps to determine if mustachioed men in berets really handpick blossoms to make elderflower liqueur.  In addition, Boozehound offers more than fifty drink recipes, from three riffs on the Manhattan to cocktail-geek favorites like the Aviation and the Last Word. These recipes are presented alongside a host of opinionated essays that cherish the rare, uncover the obscure, dethrone the overrated, and unravel the mysteries of taste, trends, and terroir. Through his far-flung, intrepid traveling and tasting, Wilson shows us that perhaps nothing else as entwined with the history of human culture is quite as much fun as booze.From the Hardcover edition.

    The solution, though, is simple: batch it! In this fun collection, Maggie Hoffman offers 65 delicious and creative cocktails that you don't have to stir or shake to order; rather, they are designed to stay fresh when made ahead and served out of a pitcher. Recipes such as Tongue in Cheek (gin, Meyer lemon, thyme, Cocchi Rosa), Friendly Fires (mezcal, chile vodka, watermelon, lime), Birds & Bees Punch (rum, cucumber, green tea, lemon), and even alcohol-free options are organized by flavor profile--herbal, boozy, bitter, fruity and tart, and so on--to make choosing and whipping up a perfect pitcher of cocktails a total breeze.

    And there’s much to love: hundreds of gloriously pungent varieties—crumbly, creamy, buttery, even shot through with bottle-green mold. So many varieties, in fact, that the aspiring gourmand may wonder: How does one make sense of it all?In The Whole Fromage, Kathe Lison sets out to learn what makes French cheese so remarkable—why France is the “Cheese Mother Ship,” in the words of one American expert. Her journey takes her to cheese caves tucked within the craggy volcanic rock of Auvergne, to a centuries-old monastery in the French Alps, and to the farmlands that keep cheesemaking traditions alive. She meets the dairy scientists, shepherds, and affineurs who make up the world of modern French cheese, and whose lifestyles and philosophies are as varied and flavorful as the delicacies they produce. Most delicious of all, she meets the cheeses themselves—from spruce-wrapped Mont d’Or, so gooey it’s best eaten with a spoon; to luminous Beaufort, redolent of Alpine grasses and wildflowers, a single round of which can weigh as much as a Saint Bernard; to Camembert, invented in Normandy but beloved and imitated across the world.With writing as piquant and rich as a well-aged Roquefort, as charming as a tender springtime chèvre, and yet as unsentimental as a stinky Maroilles, The Whole Fromage is a tasty exploration of one of the great culinary treasures of France.