Writers are famous for drinking, so it’s no surprise that the world abounds with brilliant nonfiction books about booze. Whether you’re seriously interested in the sociological implications of happy hour or just looking for the perfect Negroni recipe, the following books are engaging, well-researched, and — perhaps, most importantly — funny. Salud!
by Kingsley Amis, 2008
Contains useful drink recipes and advice on building a good liquor cabinet and bar.
Sample text: Evelyn Waugh’s Noonday Reviver: Put the gin and Guinness into a pint silver tankard and fill to the brim with ginger beer. I cannot vouch for the authenticity of the attribution, which I heard in talk, but the mixture will certainly revive you, or something. I should think two doses is the limit.
Imbibe! From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash, a Salute in Stories and Drinks to Professor Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar
by David Wondrich, 2007
Contains useful and esoteric drink recipes and sound advice on building a good liquor cabinet and bar.
Sample text: Everything new always turfs up a few people who liked the old way better. So no one should be surprised that when the plain Cocktail began gathering unto its bosom troubling dashes of curacoa and absinthe and truly alarming dashes of vermouth, fruit juice, and orgeat syrup, there were those who cried bloody murder.
The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World’s Great Drinks
by Amy Stewart, 2013
Includes cocktail recipes and recipes for ingredients such as homemade grenadine and nocino.
Sample text: Spruce beer was well known to Jane Austen, who wrote to her sister Cassandra in 1809 about brewing a “great cask” of it.
The Life and Times of the Late Demon Rum
by J.C. Furnas, 1965
Does not contain drink recipes, but does contain an impressive selection of awful Temperance poetry.
Sample text: Prohibition was certainly a ravaging ailment, however, and among the scars and bodily impairments it left were things even worse than the perpetuation of a newly powerful underworld. Thirty years after repeal most of us seventy million Americans who “drink” retain from the excesses of Temperance doctrine what was recently described at an interdisciplinary scientific meeting as “ a sort of societal guilt feeling about alcohol.”
Boozehound: On the Trail of the Rare, the Obscure, and the Overrated in Spirits
by Jason Wilson, 2010
Contains original drink recipes and sound advice on building a good liquor cabinet and bar.
Sample text: We can pretty much blame the vodka martini on Ian Fleming, who introduced it in the first James Bond novel, Casino Royale — along with the ridiculous concept of shaking and not stirring a martini.
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