The Ice Book is the winner of the Best New Cocktail or Bartending Book at the 2024 Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards! This is the highest award within the global bar community. I am delighted! The Ice Book’s photographer Allison Webber was there to accept the award for us... Read more →
I'm proud to say that The Ice Book: Cool Cubes, Clear Spheres, and Other Chill Cocktail Crafts has been voted as a Top Ten Nominee for Best New Cocktail or Bartending Book at Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards 2024. The book was published a year ago May 23, 2023.... Read more →
I'm proud to say that Doctors and Distillers is a Top 10 Nominee for the Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards 2023, along with many other great books written by friends! The announcement is here. Read more →
If you attended Tales of the Cocktail - virtually or in person - you have access to some recorded seminars. I watched and this post reports on one of those seminars: From Usquebaugh to Aqua Fructum: The Early Modern English Origins of English Gin By Jared Brown and Anistatia Miller... Read more →
Wine was (probably) first distilled into eau de vie in the practice of trying to make medicines and perfumes like rosewater and wormwood water. Distilling these herbs would make a preserved medicine that would last beyond the herbs' seasons. Today we'd call them hydrosols and essential oils. These were water... Read more →
At Tales of the Cocktail this year, I attended a seminar called The 10 Books from Cocktail History You Never Knew You Needed (Until Now), which was lead by Robert Simonson of the New York Times and Dr Nicola Nice of Pomp & Whimsy gin liqueur. You can find brief... Read more →
For attendees of my talk on Color in Cocktails and Spirits at Tales of the Cocktail 2019, below are notes and links from the slides. Product links are to Amazon.com. For all the natural colorings to use in cocktails, see Cocktail Coloring - Natural Food Colorings to Use in Drinks... Read more →
A simple technique for extracting color from flower petals or other plants. Read more →