Cocktail Codex: Fundamentals, Formulas, Evolutions [A Cocktail Recipe Book]

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CALIFORNIA PROP 65 WARNING: This product can expose you to chemicals including arsenic and lead, which are known to the State of California to cause cancer. The book also went into great detail articulating different bottle favorites and flavor profiles for the experts out there. While pretentious at times --although clearly written for would-be bartenders-- it was a really helpful approach to understand basic cocktail formulas, and how changing the spirit or seasoning can create new cocktails. Liquid Intelligence has more tech details, and plenty of books have a bigger repertoire of specific recipes, but Cocktail Codex hits the sweet spot right in the middle.

the book is organized around 6 archetypal cocktails, with detailed explanations of how to riff on those cocktails. although perhaps a few steps beyond my level of cocktail making I loved this book for the basics - the review of the core basics of drinks, both the traditions, the exansions and variations as well as the chemistry of them.

This framework will not make you an expert, or even able to competently step behind the bar of a high-end bar, but you will gain a baseline understanding of what's going on. By rejecting non-essential cookies, Reddit may still use certain cookies to ensure the proper functionality of our platform. This is largely true, and furthermore, because the information is densely packed, you'll likely miss most of it upon first reading.

For each cocktail "template", you'll get some discussion of its history, its constituent ingredients (i.This infographic illustrates the essential components of Cocktail Codex’s six root cocktails, plus three variations on each. I don’t like its philosophy that all cocktails can be categorized under the key six (old fashioned, martini, daiquiri, sidecar, highball, and flip). The idea reminds me a lot of the book DIY Cocktails, by Marcia Simmons, which also divides up cocktails by their basic ratio, though it has more categories.