Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Let me start by saying that this book was very helpful. It could, and should, have been better. My preference would have have been to include a little more text. The book is recipe heavy (the banner does say "Includes 1,000 Recipes!" after all), but I would have liked more explanatory text as to the differences between the different styles of alcohols. They list the ales, but nothing about what they taste like. List the three types of rums but don't mention 151 or spiced rum, but they are used in recipes. There are about 35 pages at the beginning and two or three pages at the beginning of each chapter. I would have liked about 50% more.
Another annoyance is the treatment of liqueurs. Pages 86 and 88 mention the flavors of various liqueurs, but it's in paragraph rather than table form. And many are missing. Adding to the confusion, many recipes call for a liqueur by type and others by brand. I make cosmos with triple sec and the book says to use Cointreau. I understand Cointreau is a brand of triple sec, but the book should have demystified this. A table of all liqueurs and brands, with appropriate substitutions would have been very helpful.
My biggest pet peeve stems from page xii, "Top 10 Things Bartenders Should Know". Number 7, "You don't have to memorize hundreds of recipes to be a bartender. There are only about fifty recipes to know and all the rest are spinoffs from those." Very true and a very good point, but if they wanted to push that agenda they should have grouped the variations together. Case in point, the Cosmopolitan. There are 146 vodka recipes listed, but 24 are different versions of the Cosmo, alphabetized by flavor. And in almost all cases, the only difference is the flavor of the vodka. The Seabreeze and Baybreeze are variations of each other (pineapple juice vs. grapefruit juice) yet there are twenty versions of EACH. I suppose the siren song of "1,000 Recipes" was just too strong.
Sounds like a tough review but I rally do like the book. It overcomes the fact that there is a typo in the very first recipe (page 35 lists brandy twice and omits sherry). I learned a lot from the book and will use many of the recipes. A better index, some useful tables, and better information about liqueurs would have made it almost perfect. If they wanted to limit pages, they could have eliminated the foolish chapter on hangover cures.
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