Excellent book for the aspiring bartender, or any home bar

First off, I am a college student who was planning on trying to get a job as a bartender. Since no classes or license is required in my state, I figured what better way to learn to bartend than by buying a book or two! I purchased both "Bartending For Dummies" by Ray Foley, and "Bartending 101 - The basics of mixology" by the Harvard Student Agencies Bartending Course. Without a doubt Bartending for Dummies is a better book despite the lower cost. This book is broken into four parts: part 1 "The basics", part 2 “Short Shots from American Whiskey to Wine”, part 3 “The recipes”, and part 4 “The part of Tens.”

Part 1 “The basics” is a bunch of basic information that is extremely useful. There are pictures and descriptions of basically any and every tool you could ever find or want from home bars to the best stocked bars in town. They have directions on how to make garnishes, how to properly open different types of alcohol, and how to make syrup’s that can be required for certain drinks. It then has lists of alcohol and mixers needed for a home bar, broken down into how much of an investment and how impressive of a home bar you would like. The end of this section is filled with useful charts, from how many calories are in a shot of a specific alcohol, to many how ounces are in a keg.

Part 2 “Short Shots from American Whiskey to Wine” is basically a very in depth alcohol history. There are 12 different chapters on different types of alcohol, to list a few they are; beer, brandy, gin, rum, wine, scotch whiskey, Irish whiskey, aperitifs, cordials, liquors and many more. Each chapter basically describes when the alcohol was first made, how its made, how and if its aged and how to properly drink and mix this type of alcohol.

Part 3 “The recipes” is a VERY comprehensive recipe list sorted in alphabetical order. It started off with around 1000 of the most common and best (according to the author) drinks you could ever want. It then goes on to give at least 20 recipes for martinis, a bunch of punch recipes and even some nonalcoholic drink recipes.

Part 4 “The Part of Tens” has 2 sections. It starts off by giving you 10 of the best hangover cures, followed by 㥶 thousand web sites and other resources”. I did not count or verify that there are actually ten thousand, and to be honest I believe it’s a bit of exaggeration; however there are more websites than you could ever know what to do with. They are all broken down into categories to make it very easy to find what you are looking for.

At the very end of the book it has two indexes, one is for drink recipes and the other is a topic index which are both very useful if you need to figure out something on the fly and don’t have time to read a lot to figure out what you are looking for.

Overall this book was EXACTLY what I was looking for, and is perfect for anyone aspiring to become a bartender for a job, or if you just want to impress your guests with a very nice home bar.