If you're looking for a cocktail book to help you put together a great home bar and start mixing more advanced cocktails this is great but a large number of the recipes are impractical for most home bars. If you are a bartender or bar owner looking to up your skills or the level of complexity at your bar then this is really going to be helpful.
What I like about the book:
I like that this book covers everything: Bar equipment, ice, technique, history, tasting, some "story essays" about the bar, and very important for developing a home bar is that it goes through the different types of spirits and gives you explanations of the different types and specific recommendations for brands to buy. This is step one of what is needed to be a great home bartender.
What I don't like about the book:
The recipes are a reflection of the Death and Co bar, where expert mixologists are creating very interesting and complex drinks. However this just doesn't work very well for a home bar. A large percentage of the recipes require something such as "Grapefruit infused Punt E Mes." The book gives you instructions on how to make all of these complex ingredients, but they aren't practical for a home bar. Therefore almost 90% of the recipes are pretty useless for me.
The index isn't great. An index is supposed to reference every instance of a word in the book. So you should be able to look up "St. Germain" and it should give you every page where there is a recipe including St. Germain, but the book doesn't have this. For example in the section of the book on Modifier Liquors it describes St. Germain as "bar tenders katsup" because it has been used so much in so many drinks. I went ahead and bought a bottle but I have yet to find a recipe in the book I can make. There is no way to look for recipes using it other than to go one by one through the whole book, and when I have found one that uses it, the recipe contains one or more other complex ingredients that I don't have.
Definitely a very good book and I've learned very much from it, but it is far from an ideal resource for a home bar enthusiast.
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