Description

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Transforming tropical drinks with powerful techniques from the modernist bar

Weaving together lessons from the craft cocktail revival, history of the tropical canon, and today’s cutting-edge bar techniques, master mixologist Garret Richard and award-winning cocktail writer Ben Schaffer provide a unique handbook for the tropical cocktail’s next wave.

Crucial techniques are clearly detailed, including how to balance syrups, flash blend, handle carbonation, tackle tinctures, cordialize citrus, and power up juice with acid adjusting. Over the course of 84 recipes, vintage cocktails like the Rum Barrel, Mai Tai, and Ray’s Mistake are reimagined just as future classics are revealed, including the Beachcomber Negroni, Winter in L.A., and Field of Mars. These drinks honor founding legends such as Donn Beach, Trader Vic, and Harry Yee as well as modern icons, including Dale DeGroff, Audrey Saunders, Julie Reiner, and Dave Arnold.

By equipping both home bartenders and professionals with the skills to forge their own paths to cocktail creativity, this groundbreaking compendium sets a new tropical standard.

About the Author

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Garret Richard is chief cocktail officer of Sunken Harbor Club in Brooklyn. He lives in New York City.

Ben Schaffer cowrote The Dead Rabbit Drinks Manual, which won a Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Award for best new cocktail book. He lives in New York City.

Dave Arnold is a food science writer, educator, and innovator. He hosts the radio show Cooking Issues and runs the high-tech cocktail bar Booker & Dax in New York’s East Village, part of the Momofuku restaurant group. He has taught at the French Culinary Institute and at Harvard University and has appeared on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and the Today show. In 2004 he founded the Museum of Food and Drink. He lives in New York City with his wife and two sons.

Praise For…

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This book is an absolute gem! It’s a treasure trove of history along with classic and completely new techniques that can’t help but make you smile as you work your way through. A mistakenly overlooked cocktail category finally gets its due.
— Wylie Dufresne, James Beard Award–winning chef and cookbook author

Tropical Standard surveys the tropical drinks canon with the rigor and joy of jazz, offering ingenious original recipes and riffs on historic standards that stay true to the wisdom of their mixographers while adding Garret Richard’s melodious innovations and Ben Schaffer’s smooth phrasing. This book will be a revelation for rum lovers and readers seeking to modernize their mixing practices.
— Jim Meehan, author of Meehan’s Bartender Manual and The PDT Cocktail Book

Tropical Standard tracks the evolution of cocktails that evoke the warm parts of the world. Each meticulously detailed recipe represents the creative DNA of thousands of bartenders over more than a century. It's a dazzling work that will give you new powers, whether warm sunny days are outside your door or only in your mind.

— Garrett Oliver, brewmaster of the Brooklyn Brewery and editor-in-chief of The Oxford Companion to Beer

 The perfect match of word-smith with cocktail-smith. Garret Richard’s recipes are brilliant in ingredient and technique, and Ben Schaffer provides provenance with wit and authority. The book could be intimidating except for the hop-on, hop-off format that allows the reader to take elements as needed, digest them, and return for more.
— Dale DeGroff, author of The New Craft of the Cocktail and two-time James Beard Award winner

Honoring the past while forging the future of tropical drinks, Tropical Standard offers new techniques, new flavors, and new recipes that will stimulate the creativity of every professional or home bartender, whether they skew tropical or traditional. Tropical Standard is anything but standard.
— Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, author of Sippin’ Safari and Potions of the Caribbean