If you're going all in on cocktails, you want build a good home library. To the serious fan of spirits and cocktails, the topic is endlessly absorbing, and if you're a bookish boozer like me, you find that the more you know, the more you want to know.

So today, I'm going to give advice on building a cocktail library, starting with basic recipe books and then adding histories, guides to single spirits, books on more esoteric topics, and memoirs by boozers and bartenders.

You're Gonna Need Some Recipes

[Photograph: Wes Rowe]

Start with a book that contains good recipes for classic drinks, but that also has a bit of cocktail theory in it. Good choices here are Gary Regan's Joy of Mixology; Dale DeGroff's Craft of the Cocktail; and Robert Hess's Essential Bartender's Guide.

Next, get another recipe and theory book. The second book will fill in any gaps in the first, providing recipes the first author might have missed. And if the second author provides slightly different proportions for drink recipes, you can try them both and decide which version you prefer.

Playing with proportions is, in itself, a great way to learn cocktail theory, as you contemplate the balance of flavors in a well-made cocktail. If you don't like Regan's Sidecar recipe, for example, you might not understand why you don't like it until you try DeGroff's. And then you might decide, "Oh, here's the problem. Gary's is a little sweeter/tarter/boozier than Dale's." And that, in itself, will teach you a little bit about your own palate and about the importance of tweaking recipes to fit the individual drinker.

Find a Great Raconteur

[Photograph: Wes Rowe]

Then, you might look for books that tell stories but also provide recipes. Excellent possibilities here include Jason Wilson's Boozehound, Eric Felten's How's Your Drink?, William Grimes's Straight Up or On the Rocks, and David Wondrich's Imbibe! and Punch.

These writers have something important in common, actually, that make them ideal for story-telling. They're all writers first and bar geeks second. Wilson writes for the Washington Post, and his book compiles his columns. Felten's tome compiles his work for the Wall Street Journal. Grimes's book is all original material, but he wrote it while serving as restaurant critic for the New York Times. Wondrich writes about booze for Esquire. His books are not compiled from his monthly column, but they carry the imprint of a man who enjoys telling stories about booze.

Dig Into The Past

The Drunkard's Progress, circa 1846 [Image: Wikimedia Commons]

Now, dive into history. If you're interested in Prohibition, Last Call by Daniel Okrent is very good, though I found it a little wonky at times about legislative process of passing, and then repealing, Prohibition. Many readers swear by A History of the World in 6 Glasses, by Tom Standage; he covers beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and cola. I didn't personally care for it, but maybe you'll enjoy it.

Linda Himelstein's The King of Vodka is a good book about the Smirnov family, though it has more to do with the people than with the liquid. On a similar front, the NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten wrote Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba, but again, it's more about the Bacardi family and Caribbean politics than about the rum.

One book I love very much is Wayne Curtis's And a Bottle of Rum. It's light on recipes, so don't turn to it for practical content, but it's a delightfully written book about the history of rum.

Single Topics

[Photo: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

If rum isn't your thing (although if it's not, don't speak to me), you can find single-topic books on other spirits. I've yet to read it, but Michael Veach's new book, Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey, is getting great reviews from bourbon geeks. Since I have a soft spot for both whisk(e)y and guys named Michael, I have to mention Michael Jackson's work; any of his books on whisky or beer are worth tracking down. His comprehensive Complete Guide to Single Malt Scotch came out in its sixth edition a couple of years back, updated by other whisky writers (Jackson is deceased). I have an earlier, all-Jackson edition, but I hear the newer version is excellent.

If it's juniper you're after, Gin: A Global History, by Lesley Jacobs Solmonson, gets good marks from the cocktail crew.

Oddball Topics

Gentiana flowers [Photograph: Wikimedia Commons]

A good cocktail library should have a few books on esoteric topics: moonshine, monasteries, botany, that sort of thing. Max Watman's Chasing the White Dog is a fun read; while interviewing moonshiners and legal distillers across the country, he futzes around with building a home still. Madeline Scherb's A Taste of Heaven covers wines, beers, spirits, cheeses, and chocolates from monks and nuns in Europe and the U.S. And as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Amy Stewart's excellent The Drunken Botanist talks about the botanical origins of all our boozy favorites.

Curmudgeons and Memoirs

[Photograph: Wes Rowe]

Finally, fill out your library with memoirs from the booze world, personal histories about life on both sides of the bar. There are many books to consider. Perhaps the most recent is Rosie Schaap's Drinking with Men, but you can also find offerings from Kingsley Amis, Bernard De Voto, and many, many others.

Okay, I know I've missed something, my boozy bibliophiles. Fill me in! Which cocktail books do you consider essential for the home library?

About the author: Michael Dietsch approaches life with a hefty dash of bitters. He lives with wife, son, and cats in Brooklyn. You can berate him on twitter at @dietsch.

The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart is not the book I was expecting it to be. I don't know whether I misread the press materials, or simply jumped to a wrong conclusion when hearing the title, but I was expecting to find a book about using seasonal ingredients to make cocktails, infusions, bitters, and the like.

Although books like that have their value, I already own more such books than I currently need, so I found myself uninspired by this book—or, at least, my idea of this book.

But my idea turned out to be wrong, and The Drunken Botanist turned out to be a very engaging book about the botanical origins of our favorite drinks: beer, wine, spirits, and even a mixer or two.

A field of ripening barley. [Photograph: Wikimedia Commons]

If you're getting into cocktails and looking to expand your understanding of spirits, wine, beer, and mixed drinks, reading Stewart's book is a great way to do it. You'll come away with a knowledge of what exactly is in your glass and you'll be able to understand how those elements play together to form the flavors and aromas you'll encounter in a well-made drink.

Drinks, Shoots, and Leaves

The book's origins arise from a conversation Stewart had some years ago with a fellow botanist. He told Stewart he disliked gin, and she first vowed to make him a cocktail that would make a gin lover of him, and then expressed her surprise that a botanist could fail to love gin, which is full of botanical ingredients: not only the grain that makes the spirit itself, but also the herbs and spice and citrus that provide gin's robust, complex flavors.

Grapes, Grains, and Grasses

In the book's introduction, Stewart says, "Every great drink starts with a plant" and of course, this is obviously true. Beer starts from barley or other grains; wine, from grapes or other fruit. Vodka comes from grains or potatoes. Whisk(e)y arises from barley, corn, rye, or other grains.

Stewart uses this simple truth as a starting point for a fascinating book, one that rewards a cover-to-cover read. The first part of the book covers the classic booze-worthy plants, the ones used most often to produce alcohol. Here you'll find agave, apple, barley, corn, grapes, and onward through wheat. She discusses the history of each crop and its history as an ingredient in beverage alcohol. She doesn't shy away from unpleasant facts, either, such as the sustainability crisis facing agave agriculture in Mexico, for example.

The first part concludes with a look at less-common or even bizarre plants that have been turned into booze: bananas, cassava, parsnips, and something called a monkey puzzle.

In part two, she turns her green thumb toward the flavoring elements that go into beverage alcohol. Here she first covers herbs and spices—allspice, angelica, bison grass, cardamom, gentian, ginger, juniper, licorice and its relatives, vanilla, wormwood, and many others. Then she hits flowers—chamomile, hops, jasmine, rose, etc. Next up are trees—angostura, birch, cinchona, cinnamon, sugar maple. Next up is fruit—apricots, currents, figs, and the variety of citrus fruits, among others. Finally, she ends part two with a look at nuts and seeds: almond, coffee, hazelnut, kola nut, and walnut.

Gentiana lutea. [Photograph: Wikimedia Commons]

Only in part three, by far the shortest part of the book, does she tackle the topic that I initially thought comprised the entirety of the book: infusions, syrups, homemade liqueurs, and pickles. She even provides instructions on home-brining olives.

The book features several types of informative sidebars. The most practical are the recipes: not just cocktail recipes but instructions for syrups, pickles, and liqueurs such as limoncello.

Another sidebar talks to gardeners and provides DIY advice on growing these crops. Some, of course, are less practical than others. She acknowledges that only the most die-hard of home-brewers, for example, will grow their own barley. But others, such as lemon verbena and black currants, though, are within the grasp of nearly any gardener.

A flowering Lemon verbena, Aloysia triphylla, photographed in Karkur, Israel. [Photograph: Wikimedia Commons]

She takes time out to discuss plants that affect booze production without being ingredients of their own: oak (for barrel aging, of course) and cork oak.

Finally, though it's not a plant and therefore not botanical at all, Stewart takes the time to discuss a topic without which, none of these wondrous drinks would be possible: yeast.

A careful and knowledgable reader might find some of the discussion a bit thin, as I did when reading about the history of bourbon, located logically enough in her chapter on corn. But this is excusable; she only has so many pages, and the topic is hefty enough to support an entire botanical library. Further, if you're looking for a book full of recipes for cocktails, syrups, infusions, bitters, liqueurs, mixers, and other plant-based cocktail ingredients, you're simply in the wrong place.

But if you're curious about the plants you're drinking with each toast, I recommend The Drunken Botanist, an delightfully informative and entertaining book about the basic ingredients of beverage alcohol.

About the author: Michael Dietsch approaches life with a hefty dash of bitters. He lives with wife, son, and cats in Brooklyn. You can reach him on twitter at @dietsch.

Sample book provided for review consideration.

Fred Yarm knows how to drink in Boston. If you follow his blog Cocktail Virgin/Slut, you already know this. Now he's put his tippling expertise into print in his new book Drink & Tell: A Boston Cocktail Book.

The cocktail scene in Boston is thriving, and not just at nationally known bars such as Drink and Eastern Standard, but also at dozens of lesser known bars and restaurants around the city.

Drink & Tell leads the reader through the Boston-area scene, stopping at bars in Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Allston, and South Boston. The book starts with a neighborhood-by-neighborhood look at the craft-cocktail scene, and then presents over 500 recipes from those bars.

The recipes are presented alphabetically by drink name. The book's layout is clean and easy to read, with notes that provide a brief history of each drink, mentioning the bartender who created it and the venue where it was created. The notes are brief, though, and don't explain how the drink tastes or how the bartender happened to come up with the recipe. I don't consider that a flaw of the book; space is limited, after all. But if you're looking for those details, you won't find them here.

(Most, if not all, of these recipes are edited down from blog posts at the Cocktail Virgin site, and Yarm offers some of those details in his online write-ups.)

The recipes are easy to follow; the ingredients are listed in order, and the directions are clearly written. An appendix at the back provides recipes for all the syrups used in the drinks. A note after each syrup recipe directs you to the drink(s) in which the syrup is used.

Having imbibed in Boston cocktail bars on many occasions, I was eager to try a recipe from the book. I wanted to find something fun and even a little whimsical. I feel that often cocktails are Very Serious Business, and I wanted to find a recipe that returns the pleasure and enjoyment to cocktails. I settled on the Darkside Iced Tea, which was inspired by the Long Island Iced Tea, and which uses rum, rye, and Fernet Branca as its base ingredients. Check out the recipe here »

An index in the back lists each drink under the venue where it first appeared. This index is one of the book's few missteps. An index like this might appeal to someone who's familiar with Boston and its cocktail bars, but I'm not sure how useful it is for people outside the scene. I'd be more interested in an index that grouped each drink under the name of the bartender who created it, and I'd be even more enthusiastic about an index grouped by base spirit. If I'm using the book as a recipe guide, I'm more likely to want, say, a gin cocktail than one created at, say, Green Street.

Aside from that, Drink & Tell is an excellent tour of Boston's cocktail world, and a fine look at local dedication to quality and innovation. Some of the best bartenders in the country are working in Boston, and they deserve a wider spotlight. Cheers to Yarm for providing it.

About the author: Michael Dietsch approaches life with a hefty dash of bitters. He and his family recently relocated to Brooklyn, New York. You can touch him on twitter at @dietsch.

[Photo: Liz Clayton]

For those for like a little culture in their food-based beach reading, Merry White's Coffee Life in Japan offers an academic treatment to a culinary movement—and cultural phenomenon—so often treated lightly.

Tracing the trajectories of coffee's practical evolution (sourcing, preparation, regional tastes) as well as the social implications that came along with cafes in a nation known for its reverence to tea, White winds back and forth through storytelling that situates the brown drink squarely in a place of critical importance to Japanese culture.

From its origins in Brazilian trade (right down to Japanese migrant farm workers shipped off to fazendas) to contemporary cafes offering hand-poured siphons, "aged" beans, or classical-music listening cafés where "to create a more perfect acoustic environment, there are large stuffed animals—teddy bears, polar bears, rabbits, and dogs—sitting here and there on chairs."

Though White jumps back and forth here and there, her ethnographic treatment of the subject is balanced and inquisitive: why and how is craft valued (as in cafes where the mastery of the proprietor is the main draw), versus the cafe setting itself? How does a culture enthralled with meticulousness reconcile micro-controlled hand pouring with, say, coffee beans that may be fraudulently represented or degraded by roast quality, like the "elite" Jamaica Blue Mountain? And most importantly, how does the cafe itself—and coffee, as an originally outsider beverage—function as both respite and rebellion, as both a social space and an anonymous space?

Indeed, many of these questions are translatable across cultures—here in the US, we have plenty of places that push meticulous preparation of bad coffee, and vice versa; or spaces that seem social yet operate in a totally disenfranchised "alone with other people" fashion. That these contradictions are the human condition is one of the clearest takeaways from the book, but White's extensive experience with Japanese culture adds a dimension of seriousness and respect to the worlds in and around coffee that American audiences in particular may find validating. Why not take coffee seriously, and still be contradictory, and human? We are obviously in this game for more than just our palates.

And while White's style is certainly more academic than storycraft, or even narrative nonfiction, her open, direct approach to the combined forces behind coffee's sway over this part of the world (and, it should be added, her willingness to explore feminist questions many other writers wouldn't have thought to ask) should be of of keen interest to anyone who likes coffee, urban spaces, or just Japan. You'll find your eyes opened beyond the new and storied cafes you've heard of and into regional corners and paradoxical tastes, and into the social understanding of coffee as a break from spaces like work and life that, though challenging to all cultures, bear their own Japanese way of being—and have brought forth their own, distinctly Japanese, places of reverent escape.

About the author: Liz Clayton drinks, photographs and writes about coffee and tea all over the world, though she pretends to live in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently compiling photographs of the best coffee in the world to be published by Presspop later this year.

Pete Hamill in Brooklyn. [Photograph: Wikimedia Commons]

Look, I ain't saying New York City is the best place in the world to have a drink, right? I had my share all over the place, and all you need is a place to sit and something to sip.

But let's be honest with each other. New York City is a damn fine place to have a drink. I mean, you got your old-school joints like Ear Inn, McSorley's, Bridge Cafe, and Old Town Bar—which is so old school it can call itself old school and get away with it, pal. In places like this, you can almost imagine yourself in an 1890s tavern.

Then you have the classic hotel bars, the kind where you used to have to dress like a swell just to get in the door. Don't plan on getting in if you're wearing sweats...or even, sometimes, jeans. These bars may not have the table-thumping pedigree of the taverns, but that's not to say they're lacking in history.

Dives? Well, it's true they're sadly disappearing, in this era of high rents and smoking bans, but you can still find dank-smelling places to get cheap beer and maybe a free hot dog while playing pool and feeding quarters into the juke. You can find a Packers bar in the West Village, and I hear that even Red Sox fans are welcome in certain bars.

So it's no surprise that a great drinking town such as this has given rise to a body of boozy prose that's just as eclectic and big-hearted. Today I'm going to start an irregular series that looks at books rooted, at least in part, in New York's drinking culture.

A Drinking Life, by Pete Hamill, does pretty much what it says on the cover. It's a memoir of drinking and growing up in New York in the middle of the twentieth century. Pete Hamill is many things. He's a great writer, to start. These days, he works mainly as a novelist, and most of his fiction is set in NYC. He's a former reporter and columnist who's written for the Post, the Daily News, the Village Voice, and Newsday. He wrote the freakin' liner notes for Blood on the Tracks!

And, if you can believe in such things, he's a hero. As a journalist, he covered Robert Kennedy's run for the presidency; on the night that Sirhan Sirhan assassinated RFK, Hamill was among the men who disarmed Sirhan and helped the police capture him.

Hamill is also a former drunk, a recovering alcoholic who recounts his drinking days in this evocative memoir. He talks first of his parents, immigrants from Belfast who settled in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, long before anyone named Lethem or Gyllenhaal or Buscemi found the place. In the days of Hamill's youth, Park Slope was a working-class neighborhood, mostly Irish. His father drinks and then drinks more, spurred on by losing a leg playing amateur soccer.

Hamill's prose here is meaty, manly, especially when he describes a night he was nearly damaged in Mexico City. At times, the book drops so much sweat and piss and testosterone, you feel he's trying too hard to prove his machismo. The more you drink, smoke, and sleep around, this book seems to say, the more easily you can convince yourself that you're a hard-case kinda guy. If you're a fan of Hemingway or Bourdain, this will appeal to you. I love macho lit that grunts and grasps, so it definitely worked for me.

Hamill grew up just like his old man. He talks of following his father into saloons, sneaking beers into Prospect Park, and developing tastes for beer, whiskey, and women.

He talks of running with the mid-century version of a Brooklyn street gang and the brutal fights that broke out. He recounts long days as a sheet metal worker at the Navy Yards before going off to the Korean War.

The book is more than just a memoir of his drinking days, though. Hamill first aspired to be a comic-book artist, and as a reader who loved comics long before he loved booze, I was fascinated by this part of his life. Especially the part where he beds a nude model from one of his art classes.

Later, after realizing he had no innate talent as a cartoonist, he turns to journalism, and in detailing those days, he talks of the bars favorited by his fellow scribblers and the epic drinking bouts they enjoyed.

Hamill describes how drinking ruined his first marriage and alienated him, for a time, from his kids. He talks about his father's influence, a man whose drinking distanced him from his own family. Hamill certainly connects the dots between himself and his father, but the book doesn't dwell on this. When Hamill puts down his glass for the final time, he does so in the light of what drinking has cost him, and cost his father.

This is a book of a New York most of us haven't seen, featuring taverns long since shuttered and looking at a working-class Brooklyn that seems gone forever. It's a book of a Park Slope that most of us can't even imagine, one of hard-by Irish immigrants, cold-water flats, and street stickball games.

I don't romanticize a pre-Giuliani New York. I cannot possibly; I moved here in 2002. I can only understand it through literature, and I can only experience Hamill's New York by reading his work. His city is only partially my city, but his prose evokes his city so strongly that when I walk his former streets, I see his city through his eyes.

A Drinking Life is available online, around $11.

About the author: Michael Dietsch is a guy in Brooklyn. Look for him at a dash of bitters or on twitter at @dietsch.

[Photographs: Dave Katz]

Cocktails are beautiful—crystal-clear blocks of ice, quirky antique glassware, the jewel tones of aperitif wines, the carefully balanced garnish. We drink with our eyes first. So it's strange that I own so few truly beautiful cocktail books. In my shelves of bound drink recipes, there are very few books with really high production value, with photos as glamorous as the drinks themselves.

Assouline's Vintage Cocktails stands out from the pack—this is a cocktail book that's actually worthy of a spot on your coffee (cocktail?) table. The drinks were shot at Bemelmans Bar in the The Carlyle in New York, and each photo is a monument to the cocktail, shot in gleaming, vintage-glassware glory. The settings are dark, moody, and hushed, like a bar you'd meet at for a secret tryst. This book makes you feel like putting on a slinky dress and maybe even gloves, breaking out the silver platter and the fancy ice bucket.

Though the spiral binding feels a bit utilitarian in contrast with the rest, it allows the book to rest open while you search for your bottle of Cointreau and choose cognac for your Between the Sheets. Hand-lettered recipes may feel a bit messy to some, but think of them like a scribbled note from your favorite bartender, with your signature drink scrawled on napkin to recreate at home later.

Do you have a favorite cocktail book? Please recommend it in the comments!

The original Joe, in New York's West Village. [Photograph: Rachel Levy]

What's the second best thing to drinking coffee? Reading about it. Today we're checking out the newest contribution to the caffeinated canon, from the folks behind the New York coffee-shop chain: Joe: The Coffee Book.

Written by the brother-sister team Jonathan and Gabrielle Rubinstein with cookbook author Judith Choate, and featuring beautiful photographs by Steve Pool, Joe: The Coffee Book is the most recent in a string of coffee tomes by roasters, retailers, and obsessives. (Look for upcoming releases from Blue Bottle and, reportedly, Stumptown, as well as one by New York Times coffee columnist Oliver Strand.)

Part history of coffee, part history of Joe, and all caffeinated geekery, this contribution to your bookshelf is a fast-reading little love story to our favorite little beans, as well as to the people who grow, roast, brew, and drink them.

(Full disclosure: Not only did I actually work at Joe for more than four years—from barista to store manager to trainer—but I'm also actually featured in the book—in good company along with my Serious Coffee cohort, Liz Clayton.)

Even if I weren't still something of a part of the mini-chain's extended family, I'd still be impressed by much of what's between these covers: Beautiful and expressive images; accessible writing; and clear, easy-to-follow home-brewing instructions for any average joe just interested in making cafe-worthy brews in the comfort of his own kitchen.

If you've stared longingly at that Aeropress you got for your last birthday but were too perplexed and scared to try it out, this is the book for you. And in the interest of complete honesty, I'll admit to you that though there's been a Cafe Solo floating around my office for about three years, I didn't actually know how to use it until I took my first pass through The Coffee Book. Turns out you put the grounds into the base of the carafe itself, not in the misleadingly-basket-shaped mesh filter as I had been doing.

Chalk this up not only to the usefulness of Joe's book, but perhaps also to reading the instruction manual that accompanies a new appliance before tossing said instruction manual in the trash. (Sure, I could also have learned about this brewer from this very website, but that's another story.)

Various brewing methods are demystified with easy-to-follow instructions—and, one better, super-helpful photos of the grind size each calls for; a behind-the-scenes look at the roasting process is equally enlightening without being intimidating or overwhelmingly detailed; and a collection of coffee-positive testimonials from professionals and dilettantes alike manages to be charming without appearing naive or Pollyannaish, and mostly avoids becoming one big advertisement for the cafes.

("Daddy is very grouchy if he doesn't have his cup of coffee in the morning," offers astute 9-year-old Ezra Septimus. Meanwhile, Sweetleaf Café owner Richard Nieto says, "As baristas, we are given the privilege of preparing and serving the final product to our customers. We should look to honor all the people from the coffee picker to the roaster who have worked so hard to make great coffee possible." Ezra's daddy probably heartily agrees.)

Though some stories and information included about both Joe and its coffee roaster, Ecco Caffe (via Intelligentsia) strikes me as a little inside baseball, the book does capture the passion and enthusiasm that every person at Joe has for coffee and community, which lends it a more universal appeal. (At least to coffee lovers; teetotalers might find it nauseating how much these people love the hot brown stuff.)

If your coffee table is looking a little bare these days, or if you just want to learn more about the to-do behind your daily brew, this might be just the book for you. And while you don't have to be a New Yorker to appreciate Joe, though it would probably help to be a joe lover to appreciate this little coffee compendium.

Got another favorite coffee book to share?

About the author: Erin Meister trains baristas and inspires coffee-driven people for Counter Culture Coffee. She's a confident barista, an audacious eater, and a smiling runner, but she remains a Nervous Cook.

There's nothing more refreshing than a cocktail made with freshly squeezed juice. So I was eager to crack the cover of Juicy Drinks: Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Juices, Smoothies, Cocktails, and More by Valerie Aikman-Smith.

It's a pretty book. Aikman-Smith is a chef and food stylist who lives in Los Angeles and the photographs in the book (taken by Robyn Lehr) all have a fresh and colorful vibe that makes me think of sunny So Cal living. The book has a decidedly healthy bent, with far more attention paid to smoothies and other healthful tonics—How about a shot of carrot-wheatgrass elixir?

Despite their presence on the cover, the cocktail recipes seem to be a bit of an afterthought. There are instructions for how to make gazpacho cups into gazpacho shots and how to turn chilled cucumber juice into a gimlet. But in most cases, this just means adding alcohol, not composing a balanced cocktail in which the fresh juice has the opportunity to shine and the booze doesn't overpower delicate flavors.

The book should also come with a warning: Almost all of the recipes in this book require a juice extractor. There's not much in here that those of us without an expensive juicer can make. But if you already have a juicer and are looking for excuses to use it, this book will be a better fit for you.

I tested two drinks. An iced berry martini ended up more like a vodka spiked sorbet. I found the vodka flavor a bit too strong for the delicate berries, and had flashbacks to the fruity blended drinks of my college days.

[Photograph: Robyn Lehr]

The rhubarb cooler was quite a bit better. This recipe required making a rhubarb ginger puree that—once cooled—was shaken with gin and dry vermouth before serving. This drink was decidedly pretty and pink—perfect for summer, a bachelorette party or baby shower. But the gin flavor was a bit too strong and I found myself wishing for a more balanced end result. The puree itself was tasty and could be used for a rhubarb bellini—it's really good drizzled onto non-alcoholic treats like yogurt, ice cream, and cornmeal cake.

In the end, Juicy Drinks disappointed me but it may not disappoint you, especially if you're armed with a good juicer and fonder of drinks that don't come spiked with the strong stuff.

About the Author: Anne Zimmerman is a writer in San Francisco Her first book, An Extravagant Hunger: The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher, was published in March 2011. You can read more about her work here or here. Follow her on Twitter at @poeticappetite.

Sustainable Sangria from Edible Cocktails [Photograph: Claire Barrett]

It's time to reinvigorate your cocktail routine for warmer weather. How about an Aloe Pompier? Or would you rather cool down from a hot work week with a Kamikaze Popsicle? You say you want both? We'll never tell. These two recently published books will help you mix up new boozy refreshments for spring (and each title costs just a bit more than a single drink out on the town.)

Edible Cocktails From Garden to Glass by Natalie Bovis

Edible Cocktails From Garden to Glass is the latest book to capitalize on the recent surge of interest in making the cocktail hour more local and seasonal. I didn't have super-high expectations. Other books on the same topic have seemed unwieldy: all that effort (homemade simple syrup, herbs culled from your own garden, carefully cultivated strawberries) just for an evening tipple? But thanks to the enthusiasm of Natalie Bovis, I've never been more gung ho about weeding and planting.

While I was able to skip over sections about basic barware and glassware, I was pretty inspired by a chapter called "Planting Your Own Cocktail Garden." Were we getting too expert here? No. Natalie breaks it down, giving instructions for planting a garden full of cocktail ingredients on your balcony or windowsill, in a backyard, or community garden. She even offers foraging tips. The information is engaging and accessible, even when it's "expert" level advice about composting and rainwater collection. Once you've grown your goods (this could take awhile) you're ready to tackle the recipes. Some of them do require multiple steps. You must make the smoked sage syrup or the persimmon puree first, and that's an investment of time and energy. But once your larder is stocked, you're good to go, and Edible Cocktails offers dozens of recipes that allow you to show off your new skills and handcrafted ingredients. There's one set of recipes I have my eye on, and they're better suited for a girl with no garden to hoe. Carnivorous Cocktails (made with meat infusions) sound weird, wacky, and possibly wonderful. What would you think if I offered you a Bacon Cherry Creek Cocktail made with homemade bacon-washed bourbon and cherry-cinnamon syrup and a little ruby port?

Available online, about $12

Slushed!: More Than 150 Frozen, Boozy Treats for The Coolest Happy Hour Ever by Jessie Cross

Based on the title, I expected this book to be full of variations on the blended margarita. And I wasn't sure I'd be willing to pull the blender from the top shelf. But perhaps this book should have been called "Slushed!: More Than 150 Frozen Treats For Your Boozy Sweet Tooth." Because it's essentially a guide to how to get liquor into your favorite cool and creamy treats: popsicles, ice cream, frozen yogurt, semifreddo, sorbet, and granitas. This is not necessarily as simple as it sounds. Alcohol helps keep frozen treats soft and scoopable, but since alcohol won't freeze, it must be added in just the right amounts. Too much is not a good thing - it will keep ice cream from freezing properly.

Now that I know not to go crazy with the tequila—and I should know that by now, right?—I'm happy to have this book on hand for a summer full of boozy popsicles (frozen watermelon gimlets, anyone?), fancy palate cleansers (limoncello and mint sorbet), and cool tipsy desserts (dirty banana frozen yogurt, amaretto ice cream sandwiches, drunken sailor ice cream with spiced rum and candied orange peel). Be warned, you will need some tools—an ice cream maker, mixer, and blender as well as a candy thermometer and well-stocked pantry and bar. But the effort will be worth it once you're sitting on the porch on a hot night, a cool Frozen Long Island Ice Tea at the ready.

Available online, about $11

About the Author: Anne Zimmerman is a writer in San Francisco Her first book, An Extravagant Hunger: The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher, was published in March 2011. You can read more about her work here or here. Follow her on Twitter at @poeticappetite.

Sometimes you want a glass of wine (something rich and Italian sounds nice). And sometimes you want to read about wine (knowledge is power, yo).

Thankfully there are two new books to help you master either goal: Slow Wine 2012: A Year in the Life of Italy's Vineyards and Wines and The Ultimate Wine Companion: The Complete Guide to Understanding Wine by the World's Foremost Wine Authorities will have you sipping with substance and style this spring.

In 2012, Slow Food launched the first English edition of a wine guide that has been published in Italy for years. Slow Wine 2012 is built on the Slow Food mantra—good, clean, and fair. The guide embraces the idea that Italian wines can't be judged by scores or other numerical evaluations, but should be assessed according to a larger agenda. To do this, the editors of Slow Food went out into the field, traveling and tasting throughout Italy, visiting over 400 cellars and reviewing 3,000 wines (these numbers are for the English edition, the Italian edition remains even more exhaustive).

Slow Food prides itself on giving a voice to the producer behind the product and this book is no exception. The story of each featured winery is told through its people (a short bit about the winery's back story, family, and winemaking team) vineyards (location and special practices), and wines. Knowing that some form of evaluation was important, Slow Food branded wineries with symbols of snails (a winery particularly good at promoting Slow Food values), bottles (high quality wines) and/or coins (good value). Similar categories are used to review each wine. This means no matter your set of priorities you can find the Italian wine that's right for you. To this good-taste-meets-good-ethics publication, I say "Cin cin."

It's hard not to get distracted by the name on the cover of The Ultimate Wine Companion. That's because the editor is Kevin Zraly, the author of the best-selling Windows on the World Complete Wine Course.

But don't go thinking that this is a companion book to that academic tome. Instead of sommelier-level lectures on regions and grape varieties, this book is a collection of writings about wine from some of the best-known wine experts out there. We're talking essays by people like Hugh Johnson, Gerald Asher, Eric Asimov, and more. Zraly selected—and introduces—the pieces that are divided into sections like "Thoughts on Wine," "On Tasting Wine," and "Wine and Food." There are also ample pages devoted to making wine and to New World versus Old World wines.

What I like best about this book is how approachable it is. So many wine books claim to be geared towards anyone, but are actually stuffed full of expert vocab and esoteric information. This collection is built on the supreme knowledge of all these authors (if you gathered them together it seems they would have tasted all the wine in the world) and good writing. Simply put: This book is a fun read. Novelist-turned-wine-writer Jay McInerney offers his opinion on what to drink with chocolate. Zraly's not sure he agrees with McInerney, but the essay is delightful. Meanwhile, importer Neal Rosenthal gives an impassioned plea for the importance of terroir. The distinguished Michael Broadbent produced something entirely new for the book—a loving explanation of why Bordeaux remains a red wine powerhouse. A book to dip in and out of, The Ultimate Wine Companion is so well written it makes absorbing wine facts easy. I'll drink to that.

About the author: Anne Zimmerman is a writer in San Francisco. Her first book, An Extravagant Hunger: The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher, was published in 2011. You can read more about her work here or here. Follow her on Twitter at @poeticappetite.

It's no secret that beer, particularly craft beer, inspires fanatical interest. Two recently published books: The Oxford Companion to Beer, edited by Garrett Oliver, and Chicago by the Pint: A Craft Beer History of the Windy City by Denese Neu, exemplify the obsession. From lengthy, well researched essays about every element of beer and beer production, to little known facts to impress your Chicago brew loving bar mate, these books have it all.

The Oxford Companion to Beer

Garret Oliver, a leading expert on traditional brewing and the Brewmaster of The Brooklyn Brewery, spent five years editing The Oxford Companion to Beer. It's a sturdy book—more than 1,000 entries written by beer experts document the technical elements, history, beer pioneers, regional specifics, and social and political implications of a beverage that has been around for centuries.

It should be noted that this is a reference book. Definitions abound. There's cross-referencing of articles (As an example: "See also FERMENTATION" is posted at the end of the entry for Kräusening, a German term for the addition of actively fermenting wort as an inoculation to induce fermentation). There are appendices, conversion tables, and an index. "It isn't detailed enough" will not be a complaint here. The devil, however, always lurks in the details. There are some complaints in the beer community about missing or misused sources, or an accounting of facts that seem incomplete or inaccurate. But The Oxford Companion to Beer is, if anything, an academic book. It's a book every student devoted to the study of beer and beermaking should own. It's the book Garrett Oliver and other modern beer experts would have loved to use as reference as they studied their way into those expert positions. This book will be updated and released in new editions. Maybe the mistakes will be fixed, or perhaps the discussion will be spun into new encyclopedic entries. Either way, The Oxford Companion to Beer is the definitive reference tome for the modern beer movement.

Chicago by the Pint: A Craft Beer History of the Windy City

Chicago by the Pint describes itself as a "bar stool reader of historic vignettes." It's a slim book, a little larger than pocket sized but still easily slipped in a messenger bag or lost in an oversized purse. The cover bends easily back, which I don't imagine the publisher considered when designing the book, but is a lovely feature, especially since the book's vignettes are intended to be read during a visit to one of Chicago's craft breweries, while drinking a signature beer.

Author Denese Neu calls herself a "urban social scientist" which means that this book is heavily focused on historic Chicago—prohibition, bootlegging, and the weighty history and lore behind some of the city's craft breweries. To say that this is a niche book might be an understatement. Chicago in a Pint demands that you be familiar with the craft brew scene, the social history of Chicago, and the architecture of the city.

The introduction claims that if "you are looking for the history of Chicago's current breweries, you are in the wrong place." Yet the book is composed of profiles of more than a dozen breweries, all with recent opening dates. Perhaps what Neu means is that you won't get a lot of information about rockstar brewers, awards won, or organic hops. What you will get is tidbits like this: Honker's Ale, one of Goose Island's widely distributed beers, is not named after the truck drivers who would honk when arriving at seedy Goose Island. Instead, it is "simply a reference to the seasonal flocks of geese that pass through Chicago during their migrations." You know that guy who sits at the bar and always a factoid to share? This book is perfect for him.

About the author: Anne Zimmerman is a writer in San Francisco Her first book, An Extravagant Hunger: The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher, was published in 2011. You can read more about her work here or here. Follow her on Twitter at @poeticappetite.

The recent cocktail resurgence has followed a somewhat predictable trajectory. First, there was a general interest in the art of cocktails. Recipes were shared and gleaming bar tools procured. Next, niche interests developed: classic cocktails, artisan cocktails, DIY cocktails. Now, with the publication of two new cocktail books, The American Cocktail and The Seasonal Cocktail Companion, we've reached the pinnacle (or so it seems)—cocktails have gone local, and seasonal, too.

The American Cocktail: 50 Recipes that Celebrate the Craft of Mixing Drinks from Coast to Coast was written by the editors of Imbibe Magazine. Imbibe is a glossy mag that covers beverages of all sorts: Wine, spirits, beer, coffee, tea. It's a periodical that has managed to thrive in tough times by reporting on the particular joy that come from being a beverage geek. Thus, it's no surprise that Imbibe would choose to indulge our inner mixologist by giving us a regional take on the cocktail movement.

The book offers fifty recipes for revamped signature drinks from five regions of the United States (the South, Northeast, Midwest, West, and West Coast). Recipes were shared by bartenders from each region, and often feature ingredients that are locally made. The Stumptown Vanilla Flip hails from Seattle's Liberty Bar and features ½ ounce of freshly brewed (ideally Stumptown) espresso; a Mint Apple Crisp from New York's PDT features Hart of Hudson apple vodka and a fanned apple slice garnish.

I was particularly taken with the section focused on the non-coastal western states, an area that has yet to be recognized on the national level for its varied and interesting food culture. I'm partial to that swath of the map (born and bred in Utah), and I loved that the drinks in this section used native ingredients (like cactus, jalapeno, agave, and sage) to create sips that evoked the landscape. My only wish? That more of the cocktails were updated versions of historic favorites instead of simply being inspired by regional nuance.

The Seasonal Cocktail Companion: 100 Recipes & Projects for 4 Seasons of Drinking by Maggie Savarino is a charming book. It's small enough to fit in your bag, and if you just glanced at the cover, you might think the inside contained instructions for how to make the perfect breakfast scone or embellish an apron with colorful thread. But this book offers instructions of another sort, a season-by-season toolkit for stocking your bar straight from your local farmer's market.

The idea is a good one: locavores plan meals according to what's fresh in the market; cocktails should be similarly inspired. Unfortunately, the book left me a bit overwhelmed. There are few photos in this book, so when it came time to flip through the pages and choose a drink, I was left to navigate through the seasons, read the lengthy headnotes, and hope my fridge and bar was appropriately stocked.

Ultimately, I haven't made anything yet from The Seasonal Cocktail Companion, though I did spend an entire afternoon thinking about making my own sugar cubes. (Savarino swears it isn't too hard!). The strong DIY focus to this book makes me wonder if crafty, garden-growing mixologists are the intended audience for this book. There are recipes for boozy infusions, artisan bitters, syrups, salts, sugars, and seasonal garnishes. For the rest of us—those without an herb garden or hours to spend concocting small batch grenadine—there's little hope for instant gratification. I garnished my evening Jack Rose with a floating sage leaf, but somehow I don't think that's what Savarino had in mind.

About the author: Anne Zimmerman is a writer in San Francisco Her first book, An Extravagant Hunger: The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher, was published in March 2011. You can read more about her work here or here. Follow her on Twitter at @poeticappetite.

I like Natalie MacLean's entertaining and often cheeky writing about wine. Other wine writers might describe riesling as "refreshing in a world awash with vanilla, oak, and jam." But how many of them would follow that up with this aside ("In life and in wine: too much foreplay is frustrating and too quick satiation is boring.") without us collectively screaming "Nooo!! TMI!"

But in MacLean's writing, such sassiness works. She's an everywoman of wine, and in her latest book, Unquenchable: A Tipsy Quest for the World's Best Bargain Wines, MacLean turns her attention to "demystifying wine pricing in relation to quality." That's fancy talk for finding impressive wines at affordable prices.

The adventure recounted in Unquenchable is this: MacLean travels the globe making calculated stops in regions with "natural advantages that make winemaking inexpensive, whether that's climate or cheap land and labor." She visits Australia, South Africa, Provence, Sicily, Argentina, Portugal, Germany, and Canada, driving the wine routes, touring the wineries, and offering delightful descriptions of the characters encountered along the way.

I'm a sucker for good narrative, and I found it in Unquenchable. Yet solid narrative can't cover up some inherent flaws. Unquenchable works hard to show the personal, romantic side of wine. MacLean's overtures indicate that there's romance in budget-priced wine (cute winemakers, a connection to the land, decades of tradition and artistry) but that's not always completely true, and to characterize bottom-shelf bottles as artisanal is both unfair and sometimes a little misleading. Thus, I found myself wanting MacLean to cut to the chase—I wanted advice on a bottle to open with dinner tonight.

Thankfully, some information could be found at the end of each chapter. These "Field Notes" were undoubtedly my favorite part of the book, so much so, that I'm wishing for a pocket guide filled with MacLean's insider tips, lists of top producers, best value wines, terrific pairings, recipe and menu ideas, and other resources that will help encourage informed quaffing.

But (there had to be a but!) it's important to note that not all the wines she recommends will appeal to all palates. For me, personally, the hot-weather regions she recommends aren't all that appealing, and I'd have far preferred less romantic narrative and a deeper list of bargain wines from places like France, Italy, Austria, Greece, and Spain.

My favorite part of Unquenchable ended up being MacLean's lists of "Related Reading." The lists serve as an effective postscript to each chapter, and each comes with the following disclaimer: "The following books, while seemingly unrelated to the main subject matter of this chapter, provided enjoyable reading before, during, or after my travels." Some of these suggested readings are wine inspired, others are about history or travel. It's pretty clear how a reading of Evita might inspire a dalliance with inexpensive Argentine wine. But Heart of Darkness and Portuguese vino? Now that's a beguiling pairing.

A Toast to Bargain Wines: How Innovators, Iconoclasts, and Winemaking Revolutionaries Are Changing the Way the World Drinks by George M. Taber also aims to demystify so-called "bargain wines." Taber is the Time Magazine correspondent who was in Paris for the iconic 1976 Judgement of Paris tasting where California wines beat out top French bottlings in a blind tasting. Later, he wrote a book about how that tasting inspired a New World wine revolution. Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the 1976 Paris Tasting that Revolutionized Wine was both a best seller and the basis for the movie Bottleshock.

Now, Taber is at it again. Like MacLean, he seems to be in search of a bargain. The book is divided into two parts: The beginning is a narrative in which Taber argues why "bargain" wines should be taken seriously by today's drinkers. He profiles iconic cheap wine purveyors (think Two Buck Chuck's founder Fred Franzia). He ends with China...China? Did you ever wonder how China could influence our wine economy? This chapter is fascinating because Taber is, at heart, a reporter. He's good at laying a story down and telling readers why we need to pay attention.

The second half of the book is devoted to what I said I wanted from Natalie MacLean's Unquenchable: a straight-up buying guide in which Taber offers lists of his favorite bargain wines, the best brands (sorted by region and grape), and some token splurge bottles. In entirety, there are 400 recommended wines in this tome.

Taber defines a bargain wine as a bottle that sells for $10. And here's where things get sticky. On one hand, for plenty of Americans, $10 ain't cheap. On the other, there's some stuff in here that I'd never really want to drink—I'm not sure it's helpful that he included a Riunite Strawberry White Merlot in the guide.

I'd have been far happier with a more expansive list of what a friend used to call slutty wines—recommended cheap, easy drinking wines. These wines are mostly drunk right away, and they're not what you'd call refined. Big, boozy, easy-drinking party wine (a Mae West wine as compared to the more elegant Audrey Hepburn)—I'm still looking for good advice in that category.

There are more bargain wines in the world than ever before. But wine lovers on a budget want their sips to be better than drinkable—We want delicious! While both solid attempts, Unquenchable: A Tipsy Quest for the World's Best Bargain Wines and A Toast to Bargain Wines only prove that finding a good bargain bottle isn't easy.

About the author: Anne Zimmerman is a writer in San Francisco Her first book, An Extravagant Hunger: The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher, was published in March 2011. You can read more about her work here or here. Follow her on Twitter at @poeticappetite.

I'm a huge fan of using metaphor to help demystify alcohol. This is why I nearly leapt out of bed while reading Bitters: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All with Cocktails, Recipes & Formulas. Author Brad Thomas Parsons called bitters "An essential seasoning agent for drinks and even food." Think of them, he says, "as a bartender's salt and pepper."

Bitters—an alcoholic infusion made from various herbs, plants, roots, and barks—are essential to the modern cocktail mixer.

According to Parsons, bitters are the ultimate matchmaker for hard alcohols:

Just a dash or two [of bitters] can bring perfect balance to two seemingly incompatible spirits. Adding bitters can tamp down an overly sweet drink, help cut through richness, unite disparate ingredients, and add an aromatic spiciness."

Part history, part project guide, and part recipe book, (there are recipes for both traditional and new cocktails as well as for food made with bitters) the book manages to do what most do not: wrap up centuries worth of information about a single subject into one book you'll be eager to dig in and out of.

There are several things about this book that make it so alluring. First, it's comprehensive. Some expert mixologists might not find themselves challenged enough, but for most, there's a host of interesting information. As recently as 2003, there were only a handful of bitters available commercially. Now there are dozens, with more appearing every day. Thus, the history, the descriptions of available bitters, and a list of dried herbs, spices, and botanicals that can be used to make bitters are both fascinating and useful.

But—and I cannot stress this enough—Bitters: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All, with Cocktails, Recipes & Formulas isn't just pages of facts interspersed with the occasional cocktail recipe. The book is engaging. Shortly after beginning to read it, it occurred to me: This is a biography of bitters. Parsons is clearly smitten with his ingredient, and the book is fun to read.

Finally, the book is gorgeous. This shouldn't matter much, but for this book, it does. The pages are heavy, the photographs dark and brooding. The book practically begs for a dark leather chair, a roaring fireplace, and a Manhattan. For weeks it has sat on my coffee table alongside other lovely greats—M.F.K. Fisher and the new food issue of the New Yorker—and I've dipped in and out of it at whim, often getting up a few minutes later to mix a drink.

With December upon us, I'd recommend Bitters as a nearly ideal gift—especially when wrapped with a bottle of artisan bitters. Meanwhile, I'm anxious to spend a few nights at home getting to know those funny dark bottles perched at the edge of the bar.

Win A Copy!

Thanks to the generous folks over at Ten Speed Press, we are giving away five (5) copies of Bitters: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All this week.

All you have to do is tell us which bottles of bitters you keep around at home in the comments section below.

The standard Serious Eats contest rules apply.

This contest is now closed.

About the author: Anne Zimmerman is a writer in San Francisco. Her first book, An Extravagant Hunger: The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher, was published in March 2011. You can read more about her work here or here. Follow her on Twitter at @poeticappetite.

Thanks to the recent Ken Burns documentary about Prohibition and the eagerly awaited fifth season of Mad Men, the fervor over cocktails has reached a fever pitch. For most people, sophisticated sipping is mitigated by personal economy—one simply can't enjoy drinks out on the town every single night. Moreover, why would you want to? Having friends over for a nightcap is infinitely cozier than fighting for a place at a cool bar, even if they do have notable secret recipes.

Two recently released books: See Mix Drink: A Refreshingly Simple Guide to Crafting the World's Most Popular Cocktails by Brian D. Murphy; and DIY Cocktails: A Simple Guide to Creating Your Own Signature Drinks by Marcia Simmons and Jonas Halpren are aimed at the budding home mixologist. We put both books to the test.

The two books embody a similar concept: The authors want to teach us how easy it is to make good mixed drinks at home. Yet these books are as different as a martini made with gin versus one made with vodka.

DIY Cocktails embraces the zeitgeist. This book is the Hipster-Etsy-Do-It-Yourself guide to home cocktail making. The book is aimed at those of hearty spirit: the ones that like to learn about ratios, make their own syrups, and then set off on their own, guidebook in hand, to create their own magic.

The chapters in this book are divided in two ways, both by class (Tropical Drinks, The Original Cocktail, and Elegant Sips) and by ratio of strong to sweet to sour. The idea, of course, is that once you understand both the flavors you like and the ratios used to compose your favorite drinks, you can use this knowledge to create exotic and tasty cocktails of your own. And, these DIY creations will be good because you understand the principals of mixing. Thankfully, for those of us on the slow path to mixology greatness, drink recipes are written in both traditional quantities as well as the ratios.

See Mix Drink is a rebellion against so-called conventional cocktail books. Built almost entirely on graphics, it tosses the text-laden cocktail guide aside in favor of visual learning. There is color coding. There are visual instructions. There are keys and graphs. It should be simple but it sounds complicated, right?

True, the first few pages had me hyperventilating—What does all this mean? But after reading the two-page guide on 'How to Use This Book', which essentially encourages one to gather the proper tools and ingredients and breathe, I immediately skipped ahead. First came champagne cocktails (perhaps the easiest of them all). Next, the Negroni, my signature drink.

Like in DIY Cocktails, knowledge of ratios is important when using See Mix Drink, but perhaps because it's laid out visually and in recipe form, making a cocktail seems easier than with the other book. Take the Negroni. See Mix Drink claims that once you've gathered the gin, sweet vermouth, Campari, and orange wedge, it takes 2 and a half minutes to compose this drink. I couldn't find a true cocktail neophyte to time, but given the real simplicity of the instructions, it seemed wholly plausible. [An aside: See Mix Drink also tells me that my Negroni will weigh in at a light-ish 189 calories. Is this information I really want to have? I've yet to decide.]

Of course, as fun as cocktail making is, nothing is as good as getting your evening drink delivered to you while you lounge on the couch with a good book. So, if training a home mixologist is your goal, a copy of See Mix Drink will have you getting Mai Tais, Salzeracs, and Alabama Slammers on silver platters in no time.

No additional instructions needed.

About the author: Anne Zimmerman
is a writer in San Francisco Her first book, An Extravagant Hunger: The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher, was published in March 2011. You can read more about her work here or here. Follow her on Twitter at @poeticappetite.