The Cocktail Companion: A Guide to Cocktail History, Culture, Trivia and Favorite Drinks

If you own a well-equipped home bar and you are dedicated with your beverages, The Cocktail Companion by Cheryl Charming is a must addition to your library. And if you are a professional bartender, you cannot go wrong to supplement your collection with this volume. It’s excellent and very thorough though a lot of the information is for reference only and to satisfy your curious mind about cocktails. Charming spends a lot of space writing about the history of cocktails and other hard liquor, including extensive timelines. These are interesting and proves Charming has done thorough research on her subject.

Then she goes through the history and timelines of each distilled beverage, all illustrated with small, mostly historic photos. Following are reviews of known bartenders, some quite long that you may only read once or twice. You read about world-famous bars and about famous cocktails from around the world. She also lists the best websites on cocktails for your reference. The meat of the book for your bartending is the recipes: a total of sixty-five of common, less common, unusual and rare cocktails you are intrigued to test. You need a fully-equipped bar, needless to say.