Featuring an anecdote about friendship, cured fish, and work emails
The Quick Hits
- What it is: “Everything you need to know to think like a master mixologist, with 500 recipes”
- Who it’s for: Those curious about the modern history of the cocktail, aspiring bartenders looking for a foundation on how to be a bartender and a showman
- Price: $35 USD, hardcover full of glossy, terrific photosOur content will always be free to read, but please consider subscribing to stay up to date!Subscribe
The Substance
“King Cocktail”, Dale DeGroff first published The Craft of the Cocktail in 2002, mere months after 9/11 destroyed Windows to the World, the bar he ran, alongside the rest of the World Trade Center.
At the time, the “The” was an appropriate inclusion in the title. DeGroff was responsible for the first wave of the cocktail resurgence, training and mentoring your favorite bartenders’ great-great-grandmentors.
Few could predict that bartending would make such a leap as a profession, but Dale DeGroff maintains that he was ever-promising that the “recognition and notoriety of the star chefs of the 1990s would soon be enjoyed by new bartenders of the early aughts”. The years that followed were a massive cultural shift in drinking, and thus a revised edition was called for, and released in September of 2020.
A natural-born showman, DeGroff’s flair for story-telling and presentation is ever-present in this book, weaving stories and witticisms between cocktail recipes. The dedication is a who’s-who of post-prohibition cocktail bartenders, dropping the names, workplaces, and contributions of those who kept drink-making alive.
The book then moves into history, both the modern history of Dale himself and the story of cocktails more broadly. Now, it should come as no surprise that word-of-mouth stories about drinking have been embellished over the years, and I’m sure some factual liberties were taken here, but as King Cocktail said to a class of us at BarSmarts Advanced in 2014, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story”. – had he not had such a storied career as a publican, DeGroff would have probably made a very successful politician.
A bias towards the old-school is a given in a book revised by a man who turned 72 the day before his publish date, but among such dismissible implorations as stirring a martini a “slow thirty count” lie pearls of wisdom such as “A limp shake is a bad show, so have fun”. Kids these days could do to learn a little panache.
DeGroff also offers a wide-sweeping overview of cocktail ingredients. Generalities about spirits, liqueurs, fortified wines are all included, as well as a few relevant brand-specific stories and recommendations on tasting and assessing. It’s correctly acknowledged that vodka is one of the more difficult spirits to assess, due to its low-flavor nature, but as an aside, I highly recommend you side by side some options – you’ll be shocked at the differences.
A quick rundown of necessary bar tools wisely includes a few different knives, but inexplicably includes a strainer for agar-agar “caviar” a la Jose Andres. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve made a cocktail caviar, and it’s a smaller number the times I intend to make one again.
The recipes are, largely, incontestable in their nature. Sure, I make my Cosmopolitan a little bit differently, but who am I to critique the spec of the man who made them for Madonna? It’s difficult to go wrong with any of them, though, as with any recipe anywhere, you may find yourself tweaking down the road.
Towards the rear of the 252 pages, DeGroff lists an abundance of sources, including blogs, books, magazines and radio shows. A rich glossary is also included, as well as a thorough index, making the book very easily searchable.
All said, the handsome presentation of this book would make it a worthy addition just to sit on a coffee table, but the general knowledge, stylish suggestions, and profession but opinionated tone combine into a valuable glimpse into where our industry came from and what it took to get where we are.
The New Craft of the Cocktail is on shelves now at Model Citizen Cocktail Supply – if you don’t get it from us, please support a local bookstore!
And Now…a Story
I promised when I started writing here I would always leave the stories for the bottom – no “Here’s how to make chicken soup but first 600 words about my grandma” here!
I have met Dale DeGroff a handful of times, and in each instance he was warm and charming (Including a 2015 encounter during a difficult exam at Tales of the Cocktail, during which he asked me to make a Between the Sheets, a middling split-base Sidecar variation. Because no one has ordered that drink in 50 years, it was not at top of mind, and I screwed up the recipe and ended up failing the multi-section test by a matter of a few points. Those points. The Between the Sheets isn’t even in the goddamn book, Dale!)
Dale and his wife Jill used to live in a quiet neighborhood on Long Island. My good pal Doug Brickel, now of Cambridge Street Hospitality Group also lived there, where he owned a couple of fantastic bars.
In February of 2020, to celebrate our buddy’s birthday, a group of our friends from around the country devised a plan to surprise Doug at his house, and then go into the city for a big celebration. Doug, in a fit of brilliance, had one 8 cocktail chairs from the legendary Flatiron Lounge in an eBay auction after their closure.
As an excuse to get up there, and set a few days aside, I made plans with Doug to drive up to fetch one of these chairs, and kick it in the city.
Since I was the only one driving up there, I was also put in charge of sourcing bagel fixings, specifically lox, Doug’s favorite. With all of the hubris of a man on a surprise birthday mission, I stopped by the closest specialty grocer to Doug’s house and walked up to the counter to order…too much lox. I forget now the exact amount, but the guy behind the counter asked me if I was sure, incredulously, and instead of saying “Is that too much? We need to feed 8” I said “It’s fine I’m having a party” and that’s the story of how I spent $100 on cured fish and stocked Doug’s fridge for a month.
This gets to Dale, I swear.
At Doug’s bar, with the chair successfully stuffed into the back of a borrowed SUV, he asked if I “Wanted to go to Dale’s house tomorrow”. Dale and Jill were planning a move, you see, and Doug was planning to use the flimsy excuse of dropping off some liquor boxes as an opportunity to get me some hang time with King Cocktail himself, who had become a friend and regular of Doug’s.
Of course I said yes immediately, forgetting for a moment that several of our best and craziest friends would be arriving to the house only a couple of hours after our planned visit time. I made up an equally flimsy excuse of a virtual work meeting that I ABSOLUTELY had to be on this call, at Doug’s house, at a specific time.
We arrive at Dale’s house, and he answered the door in classic old guy wear – house slippers, casual slacks, and a Mister Rogers cardigan. After yelling upstairs to his wife, “Jill, Doug’s here, and he brought a friend!” Dale led me into his office and to a large shelf full of bottles. “Do me a favor and take some of these with you – anything you want, but you have to take some Cherry Heering with you too, I’ve got tons of the stuff”. DeGroff, you see, had been on a tour featuring the Cherry Bounce cocktail and was left with cases upon cases of Cherry Heering.
As we walked out of the office, he pointed to a dining table covered in large, glossy sheets of paper: The final proof of The New Craft of the Cocktail. I even got to look over a few pages of the new stuff as he half-jokingly said “Let me know if you see any typos, this is my last shot to fix them!”
Glancing at my watch, and then again at my phone, I found that we were pushing it on time to rendezvous with our friends for Doug’s birthday surprise, and I let him know it was almost time to head out. As soon as I said this, Dale comes around the corner with a pot of coffee, now in a button down and sweater.
“Punch photographers are on the way, we’re doing an article on Cafe Brulot (pg. 100), you boys want to stick around?”
Doug looked at me, I looked at Doug, then to Dale and said “That sounds great, but I’ve really got to be on this work call”.
Dale said ok, and shuffled back out of the room to continue preparing, while Doug stared at me as though I’d just grown a third head. Words were exchanged like “Aren’t you planning on quitting this job? You seriously can’t blow it off?” While I gritted my teeth and explained that this work call (for a job I was planning on quitting) was VERY important, and I simply HAD to be on this UN-RE-SCHEDULABLE call.
We bid our farewells, and made it back to the house just in time to meet our friends, and had a riotous time in the city, and if Dale DeGroff remembers me at all, it’ll be as Doug’s friend who took all his grappa and Krupnik, and takes his work calls very seriously.
Here is the Cafe Brulot article, it came out a couple of days later
A Recipe:
The Fucked Up Between the Sheets I made for Dale DeGroff in 2015
1 oz Bacardi Silver Rum
1 oz Hennessy VS Cognac
3/4 oz Grand Marnier
1 Hefty dose confusion
Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass, and stir for a slow thirty count.
Strain into a chilled cocktail glass, ignoring the fact that the washline is pretty low.
Garnish with a lemon twist.
Revel in the sentence “Well it isn’t right but it isn’t bad”.
Get ‘em on the next one.