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The Boozy Bookshelf Part 2: Electric Booz-a-loo

Sam Slaughter
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boozy bookshelf part 2 death and co book bar cocktail
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Okay, so you’ve already made your way through our first list of essentials for creating a boozy bookshelf. Great! Congrats! You now know more about cocktails than all of your friends (unless your friends are the ones that wrote the books, and if they are, don’t try and upstage them. It won’t end well.)

Now, though, like Predator in Predator 2, you’re hungry for more. You want more cocktails and more techniques. You want to know how to do everything under the sun. Lucky for you, we want the same thing, so we’ve put together a second list of essentials to round out your boozy bookshelf.

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The Dead Rabbit Drinks Manual

dead-rabbit_book-crop
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I have ten words for you to convince you that you need this book on your shelf: The Dead Rabbit is the current best bar in the world. If you’re not convinced by the accolades, then consider the fact that buying this book lets you into what is practically a Willy Wonka world of inventive cocktails as well as the story behind the owners, Jack McGarry and Sean Muldoon.

Death & Co: Modern Classic Cocktails

Death-and-Co-Book
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If you’ve spent any amount of time around the New York City cocktail scene and haven’t been to Death & Company, you’re doing it wrong. All wrong. Having won numerous awards (including best bar in the world as well), Death & Co is a haven for cocktail enthusiasts and their book of modern classic cocktails allows you to recreate the genius that is their cocktails at home.

Bitters by Brad Thomas Parsons

Bitters-Book
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We’ve said it before, but bitters are essential to most great cocktails. In his book, Brad Thomas Parsons details the history of bitters, their renaissance, and recipes for how to make numerous types of bitters. As far as single-subject books in the spirits world, this is one of the most important, as bitters (when used properly) can make or break many cocktails.

The Craft of the Cocktail by Dale DeGroff

Craft-of-the-Cocktail-Book
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Author Dale DeGroff’s nickname is King Cocktail for good reason. He’s been bartending since the 1980s and helped to pioneer a variety of methods and drinks we know and love today. In The Craft of the Cocktail, DeGroff not only presents 500 recipes for a wide variety of drinks, but also imparts master lessons through anecdotes, history, and more.

Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails by Ted Haigh

Vintage-Spirits-Book
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We had King Cocktail above, and now we’ve got Dr. Cocktail. Cocktail historian Ted Haigh’s book is a dive into lost but rediscovered drinks which also offers historical facts and resources on how to find certain ingredients that have all but gone the way of the wind. While this book is not nearly as expansive as the others listed above, sometimes the best way to learn about what’s coming next is to look into the past.

Sam Slaughter
Sam Slaughter
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Sam Slaughter was the Food and Drink Editor for The Manual. Born and raised in New Jersey, he’s called the South home for…
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All of those things are important, absolutely. However I think there's one ingredient that can make or break a good cocktail, and it's something many drinkers don't ever stop to consider. It's the humble but vital ingredient of ice.

Why ice is so important
In mixed drinks like a gin and tonic or a screwdriver, ice is added to the drink primarily to chill it down to a pleasing temperature. That's a topic we'll come back to. But in cocktails which are shaken or stirred, ice is far more important than that. Cocktails are typically composed of between around 20 to 30 percent water, and this water comes from the ice used in the preparation process.
When you stir ingredients in a mixing glass or shake them in a shaker with ice, you are chipping away small pieces of the ice so that it dissolves and blends with your other ingredients. You might imagine that water doesn't make much of a difference to taste, being tasteless itself. But it's vital in opening up the flavors of other ingredients. That's why many whiskey drinkers like to add a dash of water to their whiskey when they drink it neat.
If you're ever in doubt of how important water is to cocktails, it's worth trying to make a drink with no ice. Even if you mix up the ideal ratios for a drink that you love and put it into the freezer so that it gets to the chilled temperature that you usually enjoy it at, if you sip it you'll find that your drink tastes harsh, unbalanced, and incomplete. Even for special room temperature cocktails like those designed to be drunk from a flask, you'll generally find water being added at a rate of around 30%.
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