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

This book is certainly a classic, but it's also a bit of a mixed bag for me.

On the positive side, this book includes great sections on selecting both equipment and ingredients, technique, how they run the bar, and how they invent & evaluate new recipes. It has a large collection of interesting recipes, both classics and originals. Those are nicely organized: classics, then originals grouped by base spirit, and further divided into shaken and stirred drinks, then variations on certain classic cocktails (e.g., the negroni or the old fashioned). There are also fun little essays by some of the bartenders as well as some regulars.

On the down side, the book is quite fiddly for a home bartender (or for a small low-volume bar, for that matter). While the care and particularity of each recipe almost certainly matters to the final results, many of the recipes call for a particular brand of spirit, without discussing why that brand matters, and what might be different if other brands were used. There are at least half a dozen syrups used in the recipes (simple, demerara, cane sugar, agave, etc., plus flavored versions of them), which is a problem when (a) you use a teaspoon or two at a time, (b) have formulas that make several cups at once of each, and (c) each can only keep in a refrigerator for a week or two. At the same time, those syrups are different, so you can't just substitute one for another. I would have appreciated a section on substitutions to deal with both of those issues.

One other problem for me personally, although less of a concern for most people, many (more than half?) of their shaken recipes call for grapefruit and/or pineapple juice, neither of which I can consume. This means that a quarter to a third of the book is off the table for me.

Finally, some of the original recipes (maybe one in four or five) have a short introduction from the creator, explaining how and/or why the drink was created. Those are great, and make me wish they were present for all the recipes. There were plenty of times reading through that I wondered "How did anyone ever think to mix those things together?!" but the book provides no answers.

Despite those cons, this book is going on the bookshelf by the bar at home, and I looking forward to trying more of the originals as well as their versions of the classics. I'm very glad to have it.