Classic Cocktail Sessions: A Bartender's New-Fashioned Approach to the World's Most Beloved Recipes

For a limited time we have bookplates signed by Toby Maloney and Emma Janzen.

Most classic cocktail books hand you a recipe and wish you luck. Toby Maloney and Emma Janzen assume you want more than that.

Each cocktail here gets a full "session," the authors' term for an in-depth tutorial behind the bar: how to build good balance, texture, aroma, and temperature, how different brands of the same ingredient change a drink's outcome, and how to adjust a classic formula to suit your own taste. That approach shows up in the specific questions the book takes on. Should a Jack Rose lean on lime or lemon? Is there a good reason to use two different vermouths in a Martini instead of one?

Classic Cocktail Sessions draws on Maloney's decades of bar experience, and it explains the reasoning rather than just issuing verdicts. It'll even have you tasting a cocktail twice before it goes out, sipped through a straw the way working bartenders do, to catch what a single taste might miss.

Time-honored cocktails contain a fascinating multitude of possibilities, and this book makes the case for exploring them, drink by drink. Janzen's photography and co-authorship round out a book whose real strength is the depth behind every classic recipe.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.