Death & Co: Modern Classic Cocktails

I bought this book on recommendation from a favorite bartender. It's one of the better-value kitchen books I own: long, super dense, and cloth-bound, with high-quality photos and drawings. It's part instructions (how to properly shake and stir, how to taste spirits, what types of ingredients go well together, how to form intuition for the right amount of sweet vs. sour), part recipes, and part memoir / vignettes from the NYC bar. It's pretty impressive how erudite these guys are; they write with convincing authority, and the kind of mastery that makes the book feel like an aspiration that you know you will never fully achieve, but that you can keep turning to again and again to learn more.It gets five stars because I use it all the time and find it a fount of random wisdom and interesting asides, but I should note a few things:- There are no vodka recipes...they think vodka is boring.- Many of the drink recipes require obscure ingredients or expensive liquors, so the actual number of recipes I've made from this book so far is kind of small (limited to their "classic cocktails" section). However, this gives one plenty of room to grow and makes it possible for the book to appeal to all kinds of mixologists, from casual to more serious.- I'm sometimes frustrated by the lack of an index to their recipes, e.g. say I want to find all the recipes that include white (blanc) vermouth, well that isn't possible. I have to page through the various sections (Classic Cocktails, Gin Stirred, Gin Shaken, etc.) hoping to stumble upon this ingredient.

I love going through this book to look for ideas and gain more knowledge of bartending. It has a really nice build quality to it. The book is nicely put together with great photos, tips and tricks, how-tos and small stories.Also looks great on any coffee table

Got it for my boyfriend for Christmas and he loves it! Lots of great recipes and fun tidbits from behind a professional bar he likes to read. It also looks super fancy and is great sitting on a coffee table or bar.

This is a really handsome book - although with a few copy editing errors. It would make a nice gift for the intermediate to advanced home cocktail enthusiast. There's a lot of excellent advice on how to perfect techniques - and there's an awareness that the reader cannot duplicate everything that's done at a bar by professionals. And there's a certain amount of bragging about how wonderful this particular bar is - and I'm sure it is.The part you may find more inspirational than actually useful are the recipes. Making cocktails, like cooking, is partly about technique, but also about the ingredients. When high-end bars write guides like this they face a dilemma. They spend lots of time building cocktails with just the right ingredients - often difficult to source. And things that make sense at a busy bar - like preparing and maintaining a stock of infused simple syrups - really don't translate to the home environment where you are making a few cocktails a week. So they can dumb down the recipes - which means they aren't the *real* recipes... or they can present them as they are and risk frustrating the reader.This book takes the latter route - exotic ingredients are on full display, and the readers' first reaction is "there's not a single drink in this book that I have *all* the ingredients for - and some of this stuff I've never even heard of!"My approach to this is to rely on more basic books to figure out what you (and your frequent guests) like and then use books like this (or scanning the listed ingredients at top-flight bars) to take those drinks to the next level. To make *all* the drinks in this book, you'd need to open a bar. But to perfect your two or three favorites is quite doable.

This book is crazy - it's by far the best cocktail book I've ever seen and incredibly unique in its approach. For one, it's beautifully made with a linen binding and gorgeous full color photos and illustrations. But what I really love about this book is all the details on how the bar works - there's a script of the bar staff testing a drink, considering what it lacks, suggesting additions or substitute brands that would improve the drink. I've never really thought about how a bar works together to put a new drink on the menu, but this book exposes the process over a few pages that's totally fascinating.Other things like a chart of how Death & Co. approaches "bartender's choice" shows you the "how to" side that I've only seen here in this book. I also enjoyed the staff notes on why they select one brand of liquor over another - why use Beefeater gin vs. Hendrick's, as well as some of the inspiration behind certain drinks "it's a whiskey sour but made with tequila", will change the way you think about making drinks. The book has one page essays about certain regulars and what their drink of choice is that make this world class, destination bar seem more like your neighborhood tavern and bring a kind of familiarity to the book.Finally, and my favorite part is that the recipes are great and most are easy to make at home - this isn't just a coffee table book, it's practical and I find myself reaching for it on a regular basis to actually make something from my home bar. You don't have to make lots of custom ingredients, fat-wash a bottle of expensive spirits, or do too much that's a pain in the butt.