The Cocktail Seminars

Ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome the newest member of the family:

My third book on alcohol, and my third with Abbeville Press, is due to be published in May of this year — if that’s all you need to hear, you can pre-order a copy right here — and this little beauty is the first advance copy.

Of everything I’ve written to date, with the possible exception of this blog, this book is the one that has the most of me in it. It shares an origin with the Herzog Cocktail School and my career in hospitality as a whole: a ‘seminar’ I taught to a group of fellow seniors during my last year of college, in which we met weekly to learn about cocktails and make sure that everyone had at least some idea how to drink like an adult before we graduated.

For that class, I drew up a syllabus of thirty drinks, with the intention of covering 2-3 at each session and getting through the course in a semester. Nothing I’ve ever done has quite captured the high of that class — although I’ve made a career out of trying! — and so, in the years since, I’ve revised the syllabus several times just for the heck of it, and dreamed up 200- and 300-level sequels to what was affectionately known at the time as Mixology 110b.

As it turns out, twelve-week cumulative seminars on cocktails are a harder sell for people not already living on an academic calendar. But thanks to the folks at Abbeville, I’ve been able to collect my curricula into a handsomely bound print edition:

Not one, not two, but five seminars of thirty recipes apiece, each introducing a new suite of techniques and ingredients and building on the ones that came before. Every drink in the book gets a full-page spread discussing its history, its structure, and its technique, analyzing it and laying the groundwork to apply its lessons to other, more complex recipes.

Each seminar takes its inspiration from a particular facet of the cocktail renaissance, focusing on ingredients and recipes that reflect that moment in time, or that impulse. We begin with the canon of survivors, those drinks that made it through the midcentury mixological doldrums, and then dive into the waves of revival and reinvention that succeeded them before landing on the baroque creations of the last few years.

In contrast to most works of mixological theory, I do not attempt to reduce the whole phenomenon of the cocktail to a few template recipes. Instead, I argue for analyzing the individual modifications made to the base spirit in each drink — sweetening, bittering, souring, lengthening, aromatizing, and so on — and trying to understand how those work in practice, so as to capture the beautiful variety of the canon and grasp the foundations from which any repeating recipe structures may emerge. Each drink is consequently presented with a handy chart showing which modifications are being used, and to what degree

In this fashion, we build up an understanding of the cocktail through example and iteration, covering the essential classics and a few second-tier worthies along the way.

Each seminar also employs a limited ingredient menu. This book is intended for the home bartender, not the professional, and I have been careful to minimize the accumulation of dead-weight bottles in your home bar. Each new ingredient introduced in a seminar will appear in at least two of its recipes, and most will appear in more, or be reused in later chapters.

The exceptions are ingredients introduced for assessments, periodic opportunities to test your developing instincts with novel ingredients and situations. Two exercises per seminar (and four in the last seminar) help you keep tabs on your progress. The ingredients of each exercise cocktail are listed, and the chart is included as usual, but the specific proportions are printed upside-down so you have a chance to work through the problem yourself:

Each seminar concludes with a larger version of this, called an examination or final project depending on the nature of the lesson. Each of these features two pages of preparatory information and two pages of discussion of the solution. I've reserved it for the most complex, labor-intensive, or otherwise challenging recipes in the book in a theoretical sense — drinks like the Pearl Diver Punch and the Ramos Gin Fizz.

I am deeply, deeply proud of this book. I have designed it to function best as a curriculum, helping the novice home bartender develop a comprehensive understanding of mixology and grow from the simplicity of the Mint Julep into the confident complexity of flash blended tiki drinks and fat-washed Old Fashioneds on whatever schedule is appropriate for them. If you choose to get a copy (which, again, can be done right here), I will gladly sign it for you as soon as that becomes possible again.

In the meantime, I hope many of you will join us at a special celebratory live cocktail seminar this Friday at 8pm! The material is drawn from chapter one of The Cocktail Seminars, and happens to include the Ward Eight, a drink which excites me so much I have its recipe printed on my Herzog Cocktail School business cards. The other drinks will be the Bronx and the Corpse Reviver No. 1, for a lesson on splitting similar components in a recipe — whether that means citrus juices, fortified wines, or base spirits. You can get more information (and your tickets) here!