Stacy's Reviews > Death & Co: Modern Classic Cocktails

As a coffee table book for cocktail lovers, this is excellent. It tells the story of the bar in a way that is intimate and inclusive. There is no questioning their expertise and love of what they are doing, and just flipping the pages and admiring the mastery that is evident in the recipes gives a sense of satisfaction. But as a recipe book for the amateur mixologist, this is not as successful. First, you'd have to literally own a bar in order to have access to the overwhelming number of bottles you'd need to actually recreate all these drinks. If you're like me, living in the Bible Belt, you can't even find 3/4 of these bottles within a two-state radius, even if you had the money and storage space to acquire them. And sure, you could mix the drinks with whatever version of the spirit you DO have, but then it is not THE Death & Co drink, and these are obviously curated to be VERY specific in their combinations. When you find a recipe where you actually have all the ingredients, you want to shout, "Bingo!!!" Also, the concept of infused spirits is super-cool, but again, that's a lot of money and space you're committing to a liquor that you might use once every couple of months. I'm definitely going to try reducing the recipes to more manageable batches (and I guess, sub in my locally available spirits and just enjoy having something close to what it's supposed to be. A good drink is a good drink, right?) Lastly, and most frustratingly, the index is a joke. I don't need to know every drink attributed to a particular bartender (maybe THEY thought that was critical information?), but if you want to tell me that, fine. What I do need to know is, if I make that apricot infused Famous Grouse, which drink can I use it in? Does the index tell me that? NOPE. But you can feel free to flip through all 280 pages, hoping you don't miss it (it's used in ONE drink, on page 268, BTW.) I'm going to have to generate my own index to have any hope of actually making this something I can commonly use as a reference/recipe book.