It dives into the science or what makes the cocktails great and comes with both the ideal ingredients and substitutions that can be easily found.

I quickly made a couple cocktails from this book on new year's eve with the sherry, and it was surprisingly wonderful. I would love to find a book that builds on ratios of spirits and modifiers that can be used as a foundation for building more variations on the original cocktail. It’s an interesting book for anyone interested in how drinks work as opposed to just a list of recipes and highly recommended.I especially like the "see which variation you like" specs they have: making you taste test exactly what ratio of simple to sour you like in various cocktails and more. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. This book was helpful explaining the differences between various styles of drinks, and based on the knowledge presented I feel more likely to be able to choose drinks I will enjoy in the future. We were trying to get into PDT, and with insane wait times, we were lucky to get seated a few doors down with little wait at Death and Co.

I am a casual home bartender (at best) but also a home chef, and felt that the authors’ description of what makes a cocktail (core, balance, seasoning) helped me both mix and cook better. Around a year ago when I picked up their second book, the Cocktail Codex, I naturally had high expectations. More importantly, I love a good framework, and Alex Day and David Kaplan have developed a very helpful one for cocktail specs. Alex, Dave, Nick, and Devon do an incredible job at teaching us the basic building blocks of modern cocktails. Some of the ingredients are hard to source, at least where I live (Aylesbury Duck Vodka, La Favorite Couer de Canne rhum agricole), and some of the tools are not practical for the home enthusiast (centrifuge, smoking gun, iSi Whipper), but the reachable cocktails are fantastic.I bartended on and off throughout university to make ends meet and mostly fumbled my way through various cocktails. Some people seem to say that the first book is better and they refer to it more often, but others say that the breakdown of the cocktails into roots from the second book is really good and teaches you more about cocktail making than the first one.