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• Thirty Four New Drink Books for Fall 2024

  Update 2: Now this list is up to 34 books

  Update 1: Detailed reviews of many of these books in my story for AlcoholProfessor are here.

  

   

  Citrus: A World History

  A Forager's Guide to Wild Drinks: Ferments, infusions and thirst-quenchers for every season

  Sicilian Cocktails: Contemporary Island Mixology

  Flavor Lab Creations: A Physicist’s Guide to Unique Drink Recipes

  Gin Drinker's Toolkit

  The Art of Calvados

  Cocktails from the Crypt: Terrifying Yet Delicious Concoctions Inspired by Your Favorite Horror Films

  The Mindful Mocktail: Delicious, Nutritious Non-Alcoholic Drinks to Make at Home

  MockTales: 50+ Literary Mocktails Inspired by Classic Works, Banned Books, and More

  The Official Yellowstone Bar Book: 75 Cocktails to Enjoy after the Work's Done

  Preserved: Drinks: 25 Recipes

  The Cocktail Atlas: Around the World in 200 Drinks

  Free Spirited: 60 no/low cocktail recipes for the sober curious

  The I Love Trader Joe's Cocktail Book

  A Forager's Guide to Wild Drinks

  The Whiskey Sour: A Modern Guide to the Classic Cocktail by Jeanette Hurt

  Rum A Tasting Course: A Flavor-Focused Approach to the World of Rum by Ian Burrell

  Malort: The Redemption of a Revered and Reviled Spirit by Josh Noel

  The Absinthe Forger: A True Story of Deception, Betrayal, and the World’s Most Dangerous Spirit by Evan Rail

  A Most Noble Water: Revisiting the Origins of English Gin by Anistatia R Miller and Jared M Brown

  Spirits Distilled: A Guide to the Ingredients Behind a Better Bottle by Nat Harry

  Cocktail Theory: A Sensory Approach to Transcendent Drinks by Dr. Kevin Peterson

  Behind Bars: True Crime Stories of Whiskey Heists, Beer Bandits, and Fake Million-Dollar Wines by Mike Gerrard

  Scotch: The Balmoral guide to Scottish Whisky by Cameron Ewen and Moa Reynolds

  Martini: The Ultimate Guide to a Cocktail Icon by Alice Lascelles

  The Hour of Absinthe: A Cultural History of France's Most Notorious Drink 

  The Vedge Bar Book: Plant-Based Cocktails and Light Bites for Inspired Entertaining by Rich Landau and Kate Jacoby

  The Sopranos: The Official Cocktail Book by Sarah Gualtieri and Emma Carlson Berne

  Drink Pink!: Cocktails Inspired by Barbie, Mean Girls, Legally Blonde, and More by Rhiannon Lee and Georgie Glass

  Puncheons and Flagons: The Official Dungeons & Dragons Cocktail Book

  Cocktails and Consoles: 75 Video Game-Inspired Drinks to Level Up Your Game Night by Elias Eells

   

  New Editions and Reprints

  Jigger, Beaker, & Glass: Drinking Around the World by Charles H. Baker Jr.

  Bartending Basics: More Than 400 Classic and Contemporary Cocktails for Any Occasion by Cheryl Charming

  In Fine Spirits: A Complete Guide to Distilled Drinks by Joel Harrison and Neil Ridley

  The World Atlas of Whisky 3rd Edition by Dave Broom

  September 6, 2024

• The Ice Book Wins Best Cocktail or Bartending Book at the Spirited Awards!

  The Ice Book is the winner of the Best New Cocktail or Bartending Book at the 2024 Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards!

  This is the highest award within the global bar community. I am delighted!

   

  
  

   

  The Ice Book’s photographer Allison Webber was there to accept the award for us both.

  
  

  

  photo: @jbrasted

   

  

  photo: Jackson Cannon

   

  The official Spirited Awards press release is here.

  Buy The Ice Book from Amazon, Bookshop, or from your local neighborhood indie bookseller. 

  
  

  
  

  July 27, 2024

• Aspirational Water – A Story in The Guardian that Cites The Ice Book

  The reporter for this story in The Guardian and I talked a long time about clear ice, iceberg water, and bottled water. 

   

  

  Not much made it into the final story from me (so it goes) but I did get mentioned in the lead paragraphs!

   

  Towards the end of 2009, Camper English achieved a major breakthrough in his kitchen in San Francisco. After months of experimentation, English, a drinks industry consultant, created the perfect piece of clear ice: a cube with minimal fissures and microbubbles, as transparent as air.

  His method for making clear ice – freezing water in an insulated container, which forces tiny bubbles towards the edge and leaves the rest of the block clear – is now widely copied in bars. English has also written The Ice Book: Cool Cubes, Clear Spheres, and Other Chill Cocktail Crafts, and has found his algorithmic niche as Instagram’s top “ice cube reporter”. He regularly shares pictures of bevelled spheres, ridged gems and crystalline pebbles on his account @alcademics, all tagged with #IceBling.

   

  

  The story has some good points – the most important one being that bottled water does not compete with tap water. 

   

  But anyway, if you want to geek out about water with me, I have an upcoming water class in April 2024 you can join!

  

   

   

   

  March 8, 2024

• Has Luxury Clear Cocktail Ice Gone Too Far?

  I am quoted in this story about luxury ice (from Greenland, sold in Dubai) in which I manage to become an advocate for importing glacier ice for cocktails, lol.

  

   

  Most of what I talked about in the interview was that we all choose our battles when it comes to where and how we support environmentalism, based on personal values. The more problematic environmental issue of Martha Stewart sipping on iceberg ice on a cruise was the cruise itself. Ever had fresh Japanese sushi in NYC or Las Vegas? It was probably flown in on a plane… packed in ice.

  Anyway, I hope you'll join me in a freshly-clubbed baby seal fat-washed arctic mezcal mai tai served over a Death Valley ice sphere sometime in the future.

  Anyway, read the story here.

  February 12, 2024

• Clear Ice Football, Golf Ball, and Disco Ball

  You can make shapes that are 3D turn out clear even if they don't fit into clear ice molds. 

  It's as simple as putting them on top of a clear ice system, with the hole side down facing into the tray below. 

  Resources: 

  The Ice Book: Cool Cubes, Clear Spheres, and Other Chill Cocktail Crafts

  Football ice mold

  Golf Ball ice mold

  Dexas IceOlogy tray

   

  

  
  

  

  February 5, 2024

• Colored Hearts in Clear Cubes for Valentine’s Day

  I made these colored hearts in clear ice cubes. 

  Resources used in this video (affiliate links):

  The Ice Book: Cool Cubes, Clear Spheres, and Other Chill Cocktail Crafts
  https://amzn.to/48V4qzs

  Heart Stamp
  https://amzn.to/3uljhEk

  Clear Ice Trays:

  Clearly Frozen
  https://amzn.to/3OwGQkp

  Dexas IceOlogy
  https://amzn.to/491hByM

   

  

   

   

  February 3, 2024

• The Moist Future for MSNBC

  I was invited to write a story for MSNBC.com about the coming new normal of casual sobriety, aka the end of Dry January. 

  I made a bunch of points about generational drinking habits, parallels to vegetarianism, and flaws and challenges of serving nonalcoholic spirits in bars.

  Read the story here.   

   

  

  January 31, 2024

• Directional Freezing on The Weather Network

  Well here's something I never expected when I started experimenting with ice all those years ago: The Weather Network did a segment on directional freezing to make ice for cocktails. 

  I wish I was smart enough to have pitched them The Ice Book when it came out! 

  Check out the video here.

   

  

  January 13, 2024

• The Gibson is a New York Drink Gone Big in San Francisco

  It was believed that the Gibson cocktail was created in San Francisco. In this 2008 blog post I cited what David Wondrich told us on a tour. The information is repeated in the Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails: 

  

  But now new information has come to light. Martin Doudoroff shared information from a tweet on the Spirits and Cocktails bulletin board. 

  It is an article from the San Francisco Examiner from 1896, a new earliest first reference to the drink. From this story it seems that:

  • The Gibson was probably invented in New York 
  • It became popular at The Bohemian Club in San Francisco – maybe not invented there but transmitted from NY to SF there
  • And then it became popular in New York later, after it was popular in SF
  • It could have been equal parts genever to dry vermouth rather than dry gin but became famous with dry gin

  I always say (to myself): History is a moving target. 

  January 10, 2024

• The Mystery Pillar aka The Sacrificial Ice Cube

  In clear ice cube trays, one cube (or a few) almost always pops up and starts growing upward after some time of freezing. I call this The Mystery Pillar. Others call it the Sacrificial Cube, because it is usually cloudy and must be discarded. 

  

   

  While it would be theoretically possible to build a deformable tray that avoids this, in general I think you just need to live with it. Pull the tray out of the freezer when it starts forming- if you let it go too long, you may end up with the pillar hitting the freezer ceiling and pinning your tray into the freezer. I say this from experience. 

  As water cools and turns into ice, it expands. In a rigid container, this exerts pressure on the system, and it seems that pressure pushes one or more cubes up from the hole in the bottom of the tray. It seems it's the last cube compartment to freeze that becomes the mystery pillar. A sciency video that explains the phenomenon in ice spikes is here.

  I think that sometimes the water pushing up into the tray pushes the existing cube up – so that it's clear on top and cloudy down the cube shaft. And other times I think water squeezes up around the cube and onto the top surface so it grows that way – cloudy on the top. 

  I've been asked about the Mystery Pillar four times in the past week so going forward I'll point everybody to this post! 

   

   

  January 7, 2024

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