Saturday, June 4, 2011

Craig's "Dude Approved" Recommendations: Drinks Edition



The Beer Trials
The essential guide to the world's most popular beers, The Beer Trials features brutally honest ratings, full-page reviews, and photos of the 250 most popular beers in the world, based only on brown-bag blind tasting. The Beer Trials also includes a complete reference to the major beer styles, flavors, and regions.
- The essential reference for anyone who enjoys drinking beer
- Blind tastings by a rigorous panel of beer experts and brewers led by Seamus Campbell, one of the world's 96 Certified Cicerones
- Rates the world's most popular beers, from craft brews to macro-lagers, from Tsingtao to Spaten, Deschutes to Tecate, Maudite to Sam Adams, Bud Light to Chimay
- From the creators of The Wine Trials, the world's bestselling guide to inexpensive wines, comes the first beer guide ever to be based on blind tastings.

 Tasting Beer
Beer. It's the most popular drink in the world. Enjoyed at ballparks, in home-away-from-home pubs, on the family room sofa, and in every kind of restaurant, beer is at ease in any setting. For all beer lovers who have known the pleasure of draining a pint, Randy Mosher explores and explains the complete tasting experience as it applies to all the wonderful brews of the world.

Beer may be the common beverage of the people, but it is far from simple. With 10,000 years of history, more than 900 identified flavors, dozens of styles, and thousands of breweries around the world, beer is as complex as its grape-based neighbors in the liquor stores. It is an artistic creation, brewed from dozens of possible ingredients and processed in hundreds of different ways. Mosher guides readers to a better understanding of how every batch of beer is affected by each of the brewmaster's choices recipe formulation, brewhouse procedures, yeasts, fermentations, carbonation, filtration, packaging, and much more.
Beer can be light, dark, mild, strong, flat, or fizzy. Hundreds of tastes can be detected in beer, from resin to toast, and from apple to smoke. Readers will learn how to identify the scents, colors, flavors, and mouth-feel of all the major beer styles. There are also chapters on proper serving and storage conditions, and classic beer and food pairings
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The second half of the book is a style-by-style compendium of the different brews within major beer families, including American craft brews, British lagers, German ales, and Belgian Dubbels. For each style there are historical and regional facts, taste and aroma characteristics, seasonal availability, food pairings, and a few terrific recommendations for readers to sample.


 Raising the Bar
With dozens of years of experience as a master mixologist, and more than 250 wide-ranging seasonal cocktail recipes, Nick Mautone has gone well beyond the usual bartender's guide to offer dozens of unique and foolproof ideas for easy and successful entertaining at home.

In addition to covering all the basics of cocktail making, Nick shares his tried-and-true secrets for choosing the right drink for the right occasion, serving cocktails for a crowd, and pairing specific cocktails with specific foods. With Nick by your side, be your own party planner and confident bartender: planning ahead, creating your own signature cocktail, perfecting techniques for muddling, mixing, and floating, making the right cut-twists, zests, swirls, and wedges, plus homemade alternatives for garnishes, syrups, cordials, and brandies.

From the Buck to the Bitter Pill, this book provides a wealth of information, along with extras such as Tricks of the Trade (tips on and shortcuts for preparing and storing drinks), Bonus from the Bar (easy recipes that can be made with components of the drinks), and Straight Up (the last word on demystifying hard-to-find ingredients). Plus an entire chapter filled with tempting easy-to-make snacks and hors d'oeuvres that will complete your entertaining needs.

From nogs to grogs, martinis to manhattans, frappes to flips, and everything in between, "Raising the Bar" offers the right drink for the right occasion, morning, noon, and night...and the morning after. This is the better drink book that raises the bar with more than 100 colorful photographs and scores of helpful hints that will turn good home bartenders into great ones.

 Clone Brews
Brewing home versions of popular commercial beers has never been simpler or more fun than it is with the 200 recipes in CloneBrews. Home brewers will find everything they need to brew up a batch of their own clone of Magic Hat #9, Ithaca Brown Ale, Moose Drool, or Samuel Adams Boston Ale. And with 200 possibilities to choose from, home brewers will find the perfect taste for every mood and every season.

Revised, updated, and expanded, the second edition of CloneBrews contains 50 new recipes that reflect the current popularity of strongly hopped India pale ales and American pale ales as well as the growing interest in brown ales, imperial beers, English bitters, porters, stouts, wheat beers, and Belgian ales. The new edition also contains expanded and updated mashing guidelines and a complete review of ingredients and materials. All new to the second edition is a Food Pairing feature that recommends the best foods for every beer an indispensable feature for the brewer who also loves to barbecue or cook!

Tested and retested, tasted and retasted, Tess and Mark Szamatulskis recipes are the product of 20 years spent running a successful homebrew supply shop and working with customers to create perfect beer clones. They deliver the flavors that home brewers want, described in clear recipes that every brewer will want to make.

1 comment:

Jill said...

I love books on cocktails & beer (and wine too). Often the tone of them is what hooks me, the beverages are secondary. Great for parties & summer BBQ's.