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

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the number of ingredients you can use in cocktails is just enormous, and having some baseline knowledge really helps navigate there; the recommended bottles together with tasting notes also go a long way in this vein. And, unlike every other book you'll read this year, Cocktail Codex is packed with actual knowledge you can use in the real world.

The writing is straightforward and articulate, the photos are gorgeous, and the whole package is beautiful! He's the author of several books about cooking and cocktails, including Cocktail Codex, which was named the 2019 "Book of the Year" by the James Beard Foundation. I’m a sucker for smokey, anything so when I saw this drink by Alex Day jump out I was pretty excited. It dives into the science or what makes the cocktails great and comes with both the ideal ingredients and substitutions that can be easily found. Sean has spent the last decade teaching people how to build small businesses, playing golf, and sneaking into high class establishments where he probably doesn't belong.

It’s become an inside joke among our bartender friends to make the most ludicrous, over garnished cobbler any time one of us requests one. When I'm designing a new drink, I often flip through their recipes to see what formula I'm approximating, or what recipe might be a counterpoint against which I can innovate. More importantly, it makes it easy to understand how many cocktails simply swap out another cocktail's core or balance, and then adjust from there. I make Orgeat and Grenadine, and not against infusing some tea in a spirit, but I'm not going to start getting into centrifuging and spending thousands on equipment. It’s an interesting book for anyone interested in how drinks work as opposed to just a list of recipes and highly recommended.

I would love to find a book that builds on ratios of spirits and modifiers that can be used as a foundation for building more variations on the original cocktail.Some of it I think it out of reach for the typical home bartender (carbonating rigs, centrifuges, immersion circulators to make infused syrups), but it's still interesting to me to see their creativity and artistry. In fact, I think it might be my favorite drink I’ve made from Cocktail Codex yet – which is saying something. In Cocktail Codex, these experts reveal for the first time their surprisingly simple approach to mastering cocktails: the “root recipes,” six easily identifiable (and memorizable!

By rejecting non-essential cookies, Reddit may still use certain cookies to ensure the proper functionality of our platform.Now coming into my own, I can say that this is so much more than a bartender’s manual; it is, indeed the codex (in a very da Vinci code sort of way). 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. And, unlike every other book you’ll read this year, Cocktail Codex is packed with actual knowledge you can use in the real world. I bartended on and off throughout university to make ends meet and mostly fumbled my way through various cocktails. Some say that the first book is more about the bar itself than the theory, but then others say the recipes in the first are better.