Tropical Standard: Cocktail Techniques & Reinvented Recipes

This impressive book updates a venerable if occasionally haphazard cocktail tradition with the latest rigor in modern cocktail techniques.

Crowd-pleasing flavors have sometimes allowed bars to get away with very ordinary daiquiris, mai tais, piña coladas, and their kin. That doesn’t pass muster with Garret Richard, who runs the cocktail program at Sunken Harbor Club in Brooklyn, or with Ben Schaffer, award-winning cocktail writer and founder of The Rum Reader.

Tropical Standard brings the investigative precision of Dave Arnold’s Liquid Intelligence to a very specific category of drinks, pairing an eye-opening history with focused advice on everything from the type of ice a drink requires (and why) to ingredient proportions to mixing techniques. (Arnold wrote the foreword to this book).

This is a book for mixologists, whether professional or serious amateurs, who are interested in being fully in control of their ingredients. The authors recommend specific liquors for their distinctive flavor profiles, and provide recipes for creating and standardizing your own components, from acid-adjusted juices and your own grenadine to rapid-infused chocolate bitters and passion-fruit cordial.

With Tropical Standard you will learn:

• How an effort to recreate Donn Beach’s legendary Don’s Mix (sic), led not only to an bolder cinnamon-grapefruit flavor, but an all-new Beachcomber Negroni
• The benefits of using granulated sugar in frozen blender drinks
• The versatility of salty flavor profiles for rum drinks
• How to sugar-adjust fruit syrups to balance sweetness

That’s a very small slice of what the book offers, but anyone who devises cocktails will find this book very worth their while.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.