Published in 1920, What to Drink: The Blue Book of Beverages by Bertha E. L. Stockbridge is, at first glance, a drinks manual defined by the lack of alcohol; there are no wines, spirits, or liqueurs that are typically found in beverage books of the era. The context is crucial. The book emerges in the same year as Prohibition in the United States, when the production, sale, and distribution of alcohol had just been outlawed. Rather than resisting this shift outright, Stockbrid

In The Gentleman’s Companion, Volume II: An Exotic Drinking Book, Charles H. Baker Jr. offers something far more revealing than a conventional cocktail manual. Baker was a bon vivant, and spent much of his life traveling the world chronicling food and drink recipes for magazines like Esquire and Town & Country. "If you ever wondered whose oyster the world is, meet Charles H. Baker, Jr.” Esquire Magazine, 1954 His account of Southeast Asia unfolds as a drifting, alcohol-soaked

Liquid Intelligence by Dave Arnold is one of those books that I was told was a must-read for bartenders, and I had only read it when I was 2 years into the industry. I regretted not reading it earlier. The technical knowledge covered in the book was not the main highlight for me personally; it was more the change of perspective in terms of consistency and dilution. Back when I was still a junior bartender, I always knew that ice was important for temperature and dilution, but

"Forgotten Cocktails" – those were the words that grabbed my attention while I was looking through some new books to add to my reading list. The hardcover book was interesting. Unlike most cocktail books, where the cover is plain or features some cocktails, this one has a background similar to leather-bound books of the 1920s, framing a picture of a bar scene of the same era: a few top hat-wearing gentlemen standing over a bar counter tended by (what I assume to be) the barte