The Connaught Bar: Cocktail Recipes and Iconic Creations

Loved it

The Connaught Bar is rightfully considered one of the best in the world. I was excited to get this book, even though it’s better for reading and learning than it is for drink making. Some recipes require mixtures of custom mixtures. I’ll make some of these drinks for the fun of it, not because it’s easy.

Great insight into the minds of one of the best cocktail bars in the world

This is a nicely bound book. Fine photography. More useful as a coffee-table book. The story told in this book is not much different from so many others of its kind, but the difference between this book and the others is that this book has not one single recipe (out of 100 recipes!) that can be prepared by a home bartender. Soooo many house-made infusions and syrups...which is fine if you're preparing drinks on the scale of a world famous bar; not so much if you're making drinks for your own pleasure. This buyer has a home bar that is way beyond the scope of most home bars and I cannot make one single drink from this book without investing significant resources in the preparation of numerous infusions, syrups, tinctures and the like.

Writing this review to try and provide some balance. This is a gorgeous book - fantastic photography, clearly laid out and just the type of high quality product you'd expect from a Phaidon publication.As other reviewers have rightly pointed out, the recipes in this book are challenging for the home bartender. I would not agree that they are all unachievable though. The mocktail in the recipe above for example, requires fresh fruit that most people would have and the only 'difficult' ingredient is a pomegranate syrup, which is made simply by combining sugar, water and pomegranate juice. Also, each recipe is marked with a difficulty rating of 1-3, so you can easily see how challenging each one is going to be.Overall, I would recommend this book if you are an enthusiastic home bartender that wants to enjoy soaking up an incredibly high-level cocktail recipe book, and cherry picking perhaps 5-10 of the more achievable recipes and making those into mini projects. I'd have loved a recipe for their ginseng and bergamot bitters, which is mentioned in 4 cocktails but is not included, and instructions for how to scale down some of the ingredient recipes which have clearly been designed for a high volume bar - which is why it's 4 stars and not 5.

all cocktail are impossible to make at home I am going to donate to a charity shop.DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY ON THIS BOOK