Reddit reviews The Essential Bartender's Guide
We found 4 Reddit comments about The Essential Bartender's Guide. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Reddit reviews The Essential Bartender's GuideWe found 4 Reddit comments about The Essential Bartender's Guide. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Here is the link at Amazon.
It all depends on what you're looking for. If I had to go for one general book to start out with it'd probably be The Essential Bartender's Guide - great intro with some history, as well as discussion on what different types of drinks are, etc. Good Jack-of-all-trades book. As you get a little deeper, the standouts for me are Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, Bitters, Imbibe!, and Punch. Vintage is a great resource to get an idea of what's been done (and lost) over the years, and is a great place to learn about what types of flavors work well together, plus there's a great blurb about the history of the drink with each recipe. Bitters is pretty self explanatory, but it has a nice intro to cocktail history, and s ton of great recipes, both new and old. Really interesting to see how slight tweaks in the bitters used (Fourth Regiment vs a Manhattan, for example) makes a huge difference in the ultimate product. Imbibe and Punch are simply brilliant history lessons, with a few recipes thrown in for good measure. Cheers!
If you're looking for more of a recipe book, go with Robert Hess' The Essential Bartender's Guide. Great resource. No fluff (but some good intro stuff). Not as pretty/historical as some of the other ones, but the recipes are great and plentiful. Plus it's spiral bound, making it easy to flip through and stay open when making drinks. I've got maybe 8 cocktail books and this is the one I use the most.
No, that's definitely good thinking. I myself just bought a copy of The Essential Bartender's Guide on recommendation from here:
http://drinks.seriouseats.com/2011/04/cocktail-101-five-essential-cocktail-books-best-bartending-books.html
I've only read a bit so far, but it seems great. It's probably enough for me, but if I get another, I think it'll be Mr. Boston. Based on the sample pages on Amazon, it seems like every recipe (about 1500 of them in the latest edition) has some accompanying text with historical background and common modifications.