GQ Drinks: The Cocktail Collection for Discerning Drinkers

Senior GQ editor Paul Henderson (GQ Eats) polled some of the world’s best bartenders for their best recipes, shared here in this collection of more than 150 cocktails. Divided into chapters based on liquor (gin, vodka, whisky, etc.), the book ranges from classics, such as the Bloody Mary, Manhattan, and margarita, to riffs incorporating a wide variety of liqueurs and other flourishes. Craft cocktails that have seen a resurgence, including the shandy and the Moscow mule, are well represented. Recipes are simple for the most part, though painfully specific. If readers have the wherewithal to source Adams North Cove oak-aged vodka for a vesper, or the patience to whip up their own saffron-infused soda for the whisky-based Eorna agus Fion (“designed to progress the age-old relationship between whisky and sherry casks”), more power to them. The pretention culminates in the book’s latter pages with the Above and Beyond, a rum-based cocktail that’s served with an inflatable pillow filled with Guatemalan rainforest fragrance (or a lemon twist), and the Leather-Aged Boulevardier, a variation of the Manhattan that needs to age in a goatskin water sack for three to four days. Without a hint of humor or merriment in the book, readers will likely be left wondering how much of this will be on the final. [em](Dec.) [/em]