Death & Co: Modern Classic Cocktails Hardcover – October 7, 2014

This is a really handsome book - although with a few copy editing errors. It would make a nice gift for the intermediate to advanced home cocktail enthusiast. There's a lot of excellent advice on how to perfect techniques - and there's an awareness that the reader cannot duplicate everything that's done at a bar by professionals. And there's a certain amount of bragging about how wonderful this particular bar is - and I'm sure it is.The part you may find more inspirational than actually useful are the recipes. Making cocktails, like cooking, is partly about technique, but also about the ingredients. When high-end bars write guides like this they face a dilemma. They spend lots of time building cocktails with just the right ingredients - often difficult to source. And things that make sense at a busy bar - like preparing and maintaining a stock of infused simple syrups - really don't translate to the home environment where you are making a few cocktails a week. So they can dumb down the recipes - which means they aren't the *real* recipes... or they can present them as they are and risk frustrating the reader.This book takes the latter route - exotic ingredients are on full display, and the readers' first reaction is "there's not a single drink in this book that I have *all* the ingredients for - and some of this stuff I've never even heard of!"My approach to this is to rely on more basic books to figure out what you (and your frequent guests) like and then use books like this (or scanning the listed ingredients at top-flight bars) to take those drinks to the next level. To make *all* the drinks in this book, you'd need to open a bar. But to perfect your two or three favorites is quite doable.

Great condition

Got it for my boyfriend for Christmas and he loves it! Lots of great recipes and fun tidbits from behind a professional bar he likes to read. It also looks super fancy and is great sitting on a coffee table or bar.

I LOVE this book. I checked it out four times from the library before I finally decided to buy it! Lol. I'm a bartender and I was getting into craft cocktails when I found this book. I've learned so much about how to up my cocktail game using different techniques and methods. It's so fun and interesting! This is definitely one of the cocktail Bibles.

This is not your dad's bartending guide, which probably had hundreds of recipes for standard bar cocktails like Fuzzy Navels and Long Island Iced Tea. Here, the recipes are not the standard list, but the creations of the bartenders at the Death & Co. bar. Even if you have a pretty well stocked traditional bar - two or three versions, at least, of all the standard liquors, a range of bitters, a refrigerator loaded with various fruits and mixers - you aren't going to get very far into this book without doing some serious shopping for exotic ingredients. You aren't going to find any one jigger of this, two jiggers of that, a dash of something else, stir or shake, and serve. It's way more complicated.So why then would someone as lazy as I give it five stars? Because it's the real deal, a book that people will pore over fifty years from now.The way to think about the Death & Co. cocktails is not as a pathway to inebriation, but as little dishes, like tapas or items on a tasting menu. The Death & Co. folks are into cocktails as something to savor sensually, and they approach it with the same kind of theory and technique that someone like Julia Child would bring to roasting a chicken, with the technique and theory able to elevate what might be a pretty pedestrian experience to something to linger over. They explain their theory of how to build a cocktail, and the roles of the various ingredients in making it hang together. You have plenty of recipes to work through to see if you buy their approach (me, I went to the bar in New York with my wife, which made us both believers).If you are looking for a bartender's guide so you can sling drinks like the bartender at the local golf club or a Holiday Inn lounge, this isn't it. Go buy something like Old Mr. Boston. If, on the other hand, you want to approach cocktails the way folks approach good wine and food, this is the real deal.

Beautiful cover finish. Excellent quality, beautiful matte print. Amazing images and of course, detailed, engaging information about cocktails and drinks. A must-have!