Be Your Own Bartender: A Surefire Guide to Finding (and Making) Your Perfect Cocktail by Carey Jones

Be Your Own Bartender: A Surefire Guide to Finding (and Making) Your Perfect Cocktail Reviews

• 
  H James

  Despite exhibiting cleverness and offering excellent indexing and cross‐referencing, Be Your Own Bartender is an unreliable reference due to the numerous little things it gets wrong and its strong bias towards a few sponsor brands.
  
  The problems start with the book’s schtick: the use of flow charts to direct users to an appropriate drink. The flow charts are fun to look at, but they’re often useless because so many of the questions are frivolous. “How bitter?” is a good question, but “When’s bedtime?” is arbitrary (even more so when the two answers are “What bedtime?” and “I have a few hours…”). Further complicating matters is that most charts are exclusive to a single spirit, so a major restriction must be applied to the set of potential results before the reader even begins. A few tables do cross spirit boundaries, but they are hidden throughout the book and confusing due to inconsistent use of color. (Each spirit’s chapter is marked with a specific color; the charts use the same set of colors in arbitrary ways.)
  
  The flow charts are failures, but the book remains surprisingly navigable due to its airy design and its extensive indexing and cross‐referencing. Turn to just about any spread and at least one the two recipes will have some wayfinding to another recipe that might be of interested because of a shared ingredient, a similar profile, or other connection. I particularly appreciate those that help readers dodge less‐available ingredients (e.g., “Sounds fun, but I’m not making ginger juice: Try Noreaster (page 62).”). If a cross reference isn’t offered for the specific ingredient of interest, the index is likely to provide the desired coördinates. It would be nice to see more cocktail books follow this precedent. One minor hiccup that I note out of amusement as much as annoyance: following the cross‐references to the techniques section is more challenging than necessary due to that chapter’s use of roman numeral page numbers (you try paging to ‘xiv’ on the first try when you’re a drink or two into the evening).
  
  Despite my admiration for quality referencing that helps offset the failure of the primary system of charts, I can’t fully recommend Be Your Own Bartender because it lapses in too many other ways. Some of the technical writing (such as garnishing instructions) is hard to parse due to less‐than‐ideal wording or lack of appropriate hyphenation. Recipe ratios aren’t 100% reliable (notably a handful of recipes that specify ½ oz simple (1:1) syrup where ½ oz rich (2:1) syrup or ¾ oz simple syrup makes more sense). Perhaps worst of all is that recipes specify brands if and only if the brand is a sponsor; thus virtually every whiskey is spec’d down to the special‐edition label while tequilas are treated indifferently. Meanwhile it’s not always clear what some name‐brand products are—St. Germain, for instance, isn’t identified as an elderflower liqueur, even in the index.
  
  Though many laudable choices were made in the making of Be Your Own Bartender, the book isn’t able to serve as the trusty companion behind the bar that its authors obviously hoped it would be.
• 
  Mark S H

  Not a big drinker but found 12 drinks I’d like to try.
• 
  Caleb

  What an awesome gift and cool concept. A choose your own adventure cocktail book! Yes please!