Jerry Thomas

It's just that we've chosen ones...

The first group we did were books like, um, by Harry Johnson and Jerry Thomas that had great historical value and great bartender advice from a time when bartending was a very respected profession, and that's been lost.

It's not...

Now it's back again, but this kind of...

As if everybody.

So this was a book by Jerry Thomas called The Bartender's Guide.

how to mix drinks, or the Bon Vivant's companion.

I like to think of another name for Scott as a Bon Vivant.

I would, too.

Anyway, so this is where that comes from.

Jerry Thomas wrote this book.

It's a very classic guide, and Jerry Thomas was an African-American man,

And, you know, one of the secrets that nobody likes to talk about in our industry, we'll spill some tea here, is that, like, depending upon the night that you go to a bar, depending upon the bartender you get, the drink might taste very, very different.

Because, again, since Jerry Thomas published the first bartender's guide in the 1860s, we haven't really changed the way that we write recipes, right? The same amount of info, everything is the same.

So with Kenta, with this book, thinking about things like dilution, thinking about how quickly ice melts, thinking about the size of mixing glasses or shakers, thinking about the number of times you stir a drink or you shake it, will all affect a cocktail, right? And, and it was like a constant stream of epiphanies for me because, I mean, I've written other books.

I've written a lot of articles about cocktails.

...

he took apart Jerry Thomas', the original, the very first cocktail book, and he took it apart drink by drink and put it back together to match today's palate, right? It may have been a great drink back then.

Palates have changed, times have changed, et cetera.

So we always have to look at classics and-

Chilling, stirring, shaking, dilution, crushed ice, juleps, cobblers, smashes, punches.

By the time Jerry Thomas published the foundational bartender's guide, How to Mix Drinks, in 1862, ice wasn't some exotic luxury.

It was essential to American cocktail culture.

And Tudor became known as the Ice King.

You're doing another book with a friend of ours, our friend Jeffrey Morgenthau, a very famous bartender from Portland, Oregon, and you're going to be doing a book with him.

What's the elevator pitch here? Why is this book, this one that you did with Kenta, the Goto Bartender's Guide, what separates this from other books?

I mean, this book is completely different than every other cocktail book I've ever read or seen, right? Going all the way back to Jerry Thomas.

Like, nobody's changed the way that we write a recipe in a hundred and... 90 years, 200 years, right? And you know how hard it is to get a recipe from a bartender.