The New Old Bar Recipe Book Review and #PassTheCrown

The New Old Bar: Classic Cocktails and Salty Snacks from The Hearty Boys, a cocktail recipe book that fits my demographic of viewers. Why? Because it brings realistic cocktails to the scene from an old-school pre-prohibition past!

Making cocktails of yesterday with a new age spin and the ability to really create fancy cocktails without searching for crazy ingredients. The New Old Bar takes the time to call out the fact that tons of recipes exist that no real consumers can make (at least easily). When one goes out and buys a cocktail book they want to buy a book in which the cocktail recipes within it can be created at home–the bar isn’t buying the book, the consumer is and they want to get creative!

The book introduces us gently to their theory of cocktail making (and warnings about the lack of vodka-based cocktails), explain the core spirits in a nice high level view and even go through some of the subtle yet great secondary flavors of elderflower liqueurs, chartreuse and many other liqueur names that may be hard to conceptualize or understand if you’ve not had first hand knowledge of the products. The syrups used within the book are all included in their own ingredient break downs near the finish of the recipe book (except Orgeat Syrup, they’ve got a great story as to why though.)

I see the New Old Bar recipe book as bringing a new age spin to old school cocktails. No, they don’t re-design the old cocktails for todays age, but the way they introduce them to you and explain order them it makes it easy to get moving through the recipe book and building out some of the cocktails. The book is written in a more casual manner with fun analogies, blunt and comical explanations and everything else that takes a book from being a dry notepad of information and building an experience out of it. Will you be able to create them all? No, probably not without some investment, but what’s the fun if you can’t work towards increasing your knowledge and work towards building up your library of cocktail creations.

The only thing this book is really missing is the tasting notes for each cocktail, which is something I’m big on (people want to understand how something could taste before they invest time and money into making it). Otherwise, the New Old Bar is one of the best books to bring a younger audience to an older mindset.

If you’re looking for more intense tiki styles, with tons of juices and other cocktails (many which we’ve done on the show), this won’t be the book for you. Consider the core spirits used pre-prohibition as your starting point, get familiar with them all and then move to get creative with some of the new age cocktails so you can best understand the science behind the recipes.

Overall, a great book for the money (under USD $15 on amazon) so there is no risk to taking a chance on this cocktail book, even for those that may have four other “classic cocktail” books on hand, if anything for the fun approach and beautiful photos.

Checkout The New Old Bar: Classic Cocktails and Salty Snacks: http://amzn.to/Tv6vrI

 

Also, our Crown Royal #PassTheCrown holiday surprise, they want my viewers to pick: do I take their mystery gift or steal a different one?

Gifts I can steal: Sonos Play 3, Digital Smokehouse, Kindle Fire, Crown Royal XR & Happy Hour, Samsung Digital Camera MV800, SOL Headphones, Crown Royal Maple & Happy Hour, Mixology Class, iPad Mini (a few others I don’t even care to have at all).