Customer Reviews

The Bartender's Bible: 1001 Mixed Drinks

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

The only thing this bartender's guide has going for it is its hard, oversized cover. Otherwise its only conceivable use is to feed a waning fire. I have been a bartender for over seven years, and I have read a dozen or so reference books. The Bartenders Bible is my least favorite of all. Its organizational system is ponderous and ultimately useless to a bartender in a pinch. It is polluted with obscurely named concoctions that make an experienced bartender wonder if the editors didn't just make them up to fill space. On top of that it is sloppy. If anyone can tell the difference between the "cosmos" pg96 and a daiquiri pg97, be my guest.

I don't know what Mr. Regan was thinking with this book? I have also read his "New Classic Cocktails" and found it to be a much better read. Whatever the cause, beware of this book. Just because it called a "Bible" doesn't mean it's a Good Book.

Pretty much I agree with Brian Tomkiel's review. Complaints about looking things up confuse me, since there is an alphabetical index. There are drinks missing. But every single bartending guide I've looked at is missing one drink or another. In practice, I've never had problems with this book. Besides, most people who are asking for "popular" drinks like the Cosmopolitan and Hurricane know how they're made...it doesn't kill you to ask someone rather than looking in the book.

In the end, sure, maybe it's not perfect for bar use. Then again, I don't see the negative reviews suggesting what IS perfect for professional bar use. For home bar use, however, this book is the best of the many I have and have used.

I think this book is great! I am very happy I purchased this book, because I found some recipies for some drinks I had long forgotten how to make. I love the index in the back of the book, I can find drinks my major ingredient or by the name of the drink. It's very helpful when I'm tending my home bar during parties. I've also picked up a few new "favorite" drinks by experimenting from this book. Pick up a copy today!

I must say I disagree with the point made in Mona L Moloney's review. She says the book is unusable because it is organized by ingredient, rather than by drink. What she is missing is that this book is to be used at HOME, not at a bar. The point to the way the book is organized is is that many home bars will have only a subset of all the kinds of alcoholic ingredients available, so the home user probably will want to look things up by ingredient to see what they are capable of making with what's on hand. Besides, there is an index anyway, so what's the problem? Just bear in mind that this book is designed for home use and for that it is quite useful. It could use a few more drinks, though. I must admit it is missing some obvious ones.

As a manager of a liquor store, I am always asked how to make various drinks. Bartenders Bible is the only guide supplied by our buyer, which is unfortunate. It is cumbersome to use as it is organized, even in the index, by type of alcohol used in the drink. Most people are asking what type of alcohol (vodka, rum, etc.) goes into such and such drink, so how can they efficiently look it up by this method? Also, the book seldom has the drinks people are looking for, but is loaded with obscure mixtures that no one has heard of or cares about. This is a very user-unfriendly book.

I use this book fairly often and I respect the amount of work put into it. It is easy to use to find drinks and its format better allows the reader to encounter new ones. That is the great strength of organizing the book by main ingredient/type. If you know you like gin or scotch, you can find drinks that feature them. If you like tropical drinks, this is a surprising goldmine of ideas, as it has a good section for them. You don't have to flip through the entire alphabet to get an idea of the drinks you can make with the various bases. The one point of confusion I find is with some tropical drinks outside of that section. As any fool should know, many rum drinks are tropical, so looking in both sections would benefit you. But after all there's always the INDEX!

If you are trying to find a specific drink that you don't know how to make, why on earth wouldn't you use the alphabetically arranged index? Drinks in the index aren't listed just under their ingredients, they are also list by name. But the ingredient index is also very useful in planning the expansion of your bar. ...

The opening sections on how to do the things you need to do to set up your bar is useful. It's not complete by any means, but it's adequate for the beginner and intermediate home bartender. I find some of the recommendations for the stocking process odd. For example, Anisette, Pernod/Ricard, and Sambuca are all listed as items a small bar should have, yet these ingredients are hardly used in the enormous collection of drinks the Bible boasts. They also impart relatively the same flavor, and if that's what matters to you then you'd be better with one and then wait a long time to get the others. Irish Cream and other crucial ingredients don't make the "Small bar" list.

About drinks it doesn't have... oft-mentioned "Hurricane" is one I've seen in MANY different forms, so there is no sort of concensus on how it is made. It doesn't have many drinks that have become trendy, but it would be impractical to carry the latest drinks which rise to popularity quickly. However, I could see how a new edition could trim maybe 100 of the truly odd, obvious, or repetitive drinks to make room for some new ones. If you're trying to impress your friends by making "Flirtini"s then I suggest you scour the internet.

Overall, this book would put you well on your way to establishing a real home bar. The Bible has some cool introductions and stories for the sections and cocktails, which whet your appetite for more. It is the first book you should own if you wish to enter the wonderful world of cocktails, but by no means the only one... it all depends on where you want to go from here.

I bought this as a starter bar book. I liked how it describes the basic elements needed for a bar. I found some drinks missing (Cosmopolitan and Hurricane). I also found some descriptions of certain ingredients lacking (B&B and Benedictine). I can see how the set up for the book is bad for professional bartenders. Overall I would rate this a good book for home bars. Well worth the money for a basement bar.

This book all the basic information you'd expect from a bartending guide: glassware, tools, alcohol, mixers, and a few hundred pages of clear, no-nonsense recipes. So far, so good.

Two factors, however, distinguish this book from others like it: its organization and its snappy, literate prose.

<em>The Bartender's Bible</em> is intelligently organized by main ingredient. It has separate chapters for bourbon, gin, tequila, vodka, rum, brandy, and whiskey, as well as several chapters for other broad categories such as "Hot Drinks" and "Cordials." This makes a lot of sense for the way most of us use a book like this -- you have a bottle of Bacardi, for example, and want to discover a few novel drinks that use rum. It's then a simple matter of turning to Chapter 5 and stumbling upon the recipe for a Cuba Libre, or a Maestro, or a Rum Sour, or dozens of other rum drinks that might strike your fancy. Or if you can't quite remember the name of that tequila concoction you were served last summer in Cozumel, just flip to Chapter 7 and thumb through until you find it. (Of course, if you know the name of a particular drink, there's a handy alphabetized index in the back.)

This guide is the best on the market, however, because of Regan's skill as a writer. "Drinking," he muses, "has to do with friendship, good times, warm and tender moments, camaraderie, celebration, commiseration, birth and death, sealing a deal, remembering a friend -- the very things that life itself is about." He is equally entertaining when describing how bourbon is made as he is when remembering the warmth and laughter of his own favorite pub back in Lancashire.

You could, in other words, read the narrative sections of this book and be charmed without ever consulting the recipes even once. Do yourself a favor and get the hardback or spiral edition -- this one is bound to get dog-eared from constant use.

The only reason this book gets two stars from me is out of mercy.

This is a horrible book that IS basically useless for the sole reason that the Index is sophomorically organized at best. The book is organized alphabetically by main alcoholic ingredient. This method is unwieldy for a professional bartender and only moderately acceptable for a novice home bar. The Index _sort of_ tries to offer an alternative by listing _some_ drinks by name. However, it also attempts to index by ingredient as well.

This would be fine, except the job is incomplete. For example, if you look up a drink in the index by name, you may not always be able to find it also by main ingredient, and vice versa.

I won't return or toss this book since I've already purchased it and it might be useful somehow, if only as a second-hand gift to a friend. I would HIGHLY recommend that if you are considering purchasing a bartender's guide with any eye towards being able to actually use it, to look at "The Bartender's Black Book: The Drink Recipe Collection for the 21st Century" by Stephen Kittredge Cunningham.

It is not really needed but I will chime in and say it is the first drinks book I got, and the only one of the many I now have that I use. The others are OK for specialty applications but the sheer number of drinks in this one makes it an amazing experience. stellar are the introductions to each base ingredient section; how is gin made; is whiskey and whisky the same thing? Etc etc. A great buy!