Category: books

I reviewed 5 books for Alcohol Professor. The reviews are here. I've also pasted the post below, which originally appeared on AlcoholProfessor.com. 

The books are (links are to Amazon)

• The Bartender's Cure
• The Little Book of Whiskey Cocktails
• Cocktails, A Still Life
• Cocktails of Asia
• Black Mixcellence

Boozy Book Reviews: Late Summer 2022
New cocktail books are hitting the market at a faster rate than any normal person can review them, and yet we persist! Here is the latest round of new books to stimulate your brain about whetting your whistle.

Cocktails of Asia: Regional Recipes and the Spirited Stories Behind Them by Holly Graham

This book comes from editor of DRiNK Magazine Asia Holly Graham, who is based in Hong Kong but travels extensively, as is evident from her Instagram account @hollygrahamdrinks. Much like that snapshot of her life, the book is a snapshot of the most important cocktails, bars, and bartenders in Asia. The book features recipes of course, and they tend to be the type of drinks found at hotel bars on the World’s 50 Best Bars list with unique regional ingredients and molecular mixology techniques used to prepare them. The first ingredient in the first cocktail in the book, A Moveable Feast by Agung Prabowo of Hong Kong bar Penicillin, is vodka distilled with clams and seawater.

While many of the cocktails may serve more as inspiration rather than direct instruction to the home bartender, the drinks provide a window into both the theory and techniques of modern mixology in Asia. Before each recipe, Graham introduces the bar and bartender from whence it came, putting into perspective the city’s bar scene and the bartender’s history and role within it. Several photos of each bar accompany each recipe, providing a helpful visual image of where we’d be enjoying that cocktail; not just what is in it.

In addition to the cocktails attached to specific bars, included are several classics of Asia (including the Bamboo and Pegu Club). Other short sections include the aromas in baijiu, the history of Batavia arrack, and information about Japanese bartending beyond what we know about the hard shake and ice diamond carving. Cocktails of Asia provides a great deal of information about the best bars in a large part of the world; after all, a snapshot is worth a thousand words.

Black Mixcellence by Tamika Hall with Colin Asare-Appiah

This recipe collection comes from Kingston Imperial, the publisher that issued T-Pain’s Can I Mix You a Drink? book in 2021, featuring the same dramatic style of drink photography of bright drinks set against dark backgrounds. It is a collection of 70 recipes, mostly originals, from Black bartenders. A majority of those recipes come from Asare-Appiah, a globally known long-time brand advocate at Bacardi. The recipes are all relatively easy to execute at home, with a few infused syrups and other homemade ingredients, but nothing that requires a centrifuge.

The book is introduced with some brief but interesting history of Black mixology and traditions, including the history of Caribbean rum, the tradition of “pouring one out” for lost friends and family, the tale of Nearest Green who taught Jack Daniel to distill, and the Black Mixologists Club dating to 1898. Other featured players in Black drink history introduced in the book include bartenders Cato Alexander of New York and Dick Francis of DC, moonshiner Bertie “Birdie” Brown, and three mixologists of old famous for their Mint Juleps.

The Bartender’s Cure: A Novel by Wesley Straton

As the narrator Samantha learns about craft cocktail bartending in this novel, so too will you, down to the tiny details. You’ll learn about cocktail history, shaking versus stirring, how bartenders live and behave and talk about their regulars, building rounds and the order of adding ingredients to the shaker, the “bartender’s handshake,” and so much more. The Bartender’s Cure will give the reader a crash course in mixology without ever having to get sticky in the process.

This backseat bartending is wrapped inside a plot of a young woman killing a year in New York before starting grad school but falling in love with the profession and a fellow bartender. The book is categorized as fiction but it’s the true-life story of so many mixologists who abandoned their well-made plans and followed their passions.

The Little Book of Whiskey Cocktails by Bryan Paiement

As advertised, this is a little book containing whiskey cocktails: 40 vintage and modern cocktails (drinks like the Paper Plane, Penicillin, and Kentucky Buck along with the Mint Julep and Irish Coffee), plus ten originals from the author that all sound good too. Each cocktail is introduced with a paragraph or two on its history (for the classics) or inspiration (for the originals). The front of the book is filled out with a brief introduction to whiskey history and global whiskey styles. It is all pretty simple, and all packaged in a cute little book with a silver shaker on the cover, and it should fulfill its role perfectly as a second item in the gift bag when buying someone a bottle of whiskey as a present.

Cocktails, A Still Life by Todd M. Casey, Christine Sismondo, and James Waller

In the last couple of years there have been a slew of cocktail books paired with a concept: witchcraft, fashion design, puns, Star Wars, movies, books, and more. The problem with many of them is that the author may succeed in coming up with great drink names to pair with the concept in their area of expertise but fail at coming up with good-tasting drinks; or the drink descriptions are filled with since-disproven cocktail myths rather than accurate facts. In Cocktails, A Still Life, the text of the book was mostly written by noted cocktail and spirits author/journalist Christine Sismondo, so the text is of equal quality to the concept.

As for the drinks, the sixty cocktails are all classics or modern classics, organized into occasions for drinking like aperitivo hour and after dinner. It’s a solid selection with few surprises. But this is a cocktail book of art; the oil paintings that accompany each drink are the focus. They seem very well done (to this cocktail writer) and as noted by coauthor James Waller, artist Todd M. Casey is, “especially adept at painting the transparent glass and shiny surfaces that appear in any realistically rendered picture of cocktails, wine, or beer.” It is a celebration of art in the glass and on the canvas.

Sharing this write-up about my book from Alton Brown:

"Alton Brown has given us season after season of food television goodness with multiple shows, including the iconic Good Eats and most recently Good Eats: Reloaded and Good Eats: The Return.  He’s also written his fourth Good Eatscookbook, Good Eats: The Final Years, a compilation of five seasons of applications (recipes) from Good Eats: Reloaded and Good Eats: The Return, including one season’s worth that Brown developed during the pandemic but hasn’t made into shows (and he’s not sure he ever will). It’s a hefty volume that will make you want to go back and binge watch Good Eats shows—after you’ve made yourself a nice snack, of course.

We asked Brown about the books he’s read and loved lately, and it’s a fun collection that includes a history of spirits (alcohol, not ghosts) and a book he calls the last word on written English."

He writes of my book Doctors and Distillers:

Mr. English, a leading writer on spirits and cocktails, has written a fascinating book examining the history of beer, wine, and spirits from a medical point of view. The scholarship here is as remarkable, but above all, this is great storytelling that clearly reveals the histories of medicine and spirits as intertwined and inseparable.

Buy the book here!

• Amazon
• Bookshop
• Barnes and Noble
• Books-A-Million
• Hudson Booksellers
• IndieBound
• Powell's
• Target
• Walmart

The other month I came across a citation of something I wrote in a book that I'd not previously known about. This lead me to do a Google Books search to see if there were any more, and there were – a lot! So this post is more or less an item for my resume. I don't think I included books that only cite my work in the bibliography but in the body of the text in some way. 

Books That Cite, Quote, or Otherwise Mention Camper English

1. Batch Cocktails: Make-Ahead Pitcher Drinks for Every Occasion
2. Disco Cube Cocktails
3. Just the Tonic
4. A Proper Drink
5. Craft Cocktails at Home
6. Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails
7. The Cocktail Seminars
8. The Gin Dictionary 
9. Slippery tipples : a guide to weird and wonderful spirits & liqueurs
10. Beer cocktails : 50 superbly crafted cocktails that liven up your lagers and ales
11. The New Craft of the Cocktail
12. The Cocktail Manual
13. Eatymology: The Dictionary of Modern Gastronomy
14. Spirits of Latin America
15. Cocktail Culture: Recipes & Techniques from Behind the Bar
16. The Tippling Bros – A Lime and a Shaker
17. The Everything Bartender's Book
18. Burn the Ice: The American Culinary Revolution and Its End
19. The Japanese Art of the Cocktail
20. Schofield's Fine and Classic Cocktails
21. Ladies Who Drink: A Stylishly Spirited Guide to Mixed Drinks and Small Bites
22. Gaz Regan's 101 Best New Cocktails 2012
23. Home Bar Basics
24. The Cocktail Companion
25. The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails 
26. Return of the Artisan: How America Went from Industrial to Handmade
27. Road Soda: Recipes and techniques for making great cocktails, anywhere
28. Holy Waters: Searching for the Sacred in a Glass
29. The Way of the Cocktail: Japanese Traditions, Techniques, and Recipes
30. Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks–a Cool History of a Hot Commodity
31. Tropical Standard: Cocktail Techniques & Reinvented Recipes
32. Modern Caribbean Rum: A Contemporary Reference to the Region's Essential Spirit
33. The Bartender's Pantry: A Beverage Handbook for the Universal Bar
34. Strong, Sweet and Dry: A Guide to Vermouth, Port, Sherry, Madeira and Marsala
35. Martini: The Ultimate Guide to a Cocktail Icon
36. Cocktail Theory: A Sensory Approach to Transcendent Drinks
37. This Is A Cocktail Book
38. How to Be a Better Drinker: Cocktail Recipes and Boozy Etiquette
39. American Whiskey Master Class: The Ultimate Guide to Understanding Bourbon, Rye, and Other American Whiskeys