LEFT COAST LIBATIONS
The Art of West Coast Bartending: 100 Original Cocktails
The last 10 years have been a boon time for cocktails, a renaissance for cocktail ingredients (one’s rediscovered and one’s created anew), and for the great new crop of bars which serve them. But one of the greatest secrets ensuring an amazing evening out has only recently started to capture the attention of the mainstream media (though the cocktail intelligentsia has long known this): that the pleasure of drinking the best cocktails in the best bars is doubled when the person making them for you is also one of the star bartenders of the movement.
Left Coast Libations features 50 of the Left Coast’s most influential bartenders, from Los Angeles, where the golden era of cocktails is being re-discovered, and San Francisco, where the breadth of exceptional bars and bartenders is breathtaking, to Portland, a walking town well-suited for sophisticated bar crawls, and Seattle, a decidedly culturally influential cocktail destination. Our neighbors of the North, those trend-setters of Vancouver, are also featured in the book.
These personalities are the architects of the modern cocktail renaissance and each one of them has elevated the craft to creative new levels. Readers are presented with insights into each bartender’s philosophies of both mixology and hospitality, alongside more than one-hundred original cocktail recipes.
One-of-a-kind cocktail creations include:
Smuggler’s Notch, Eric Alperin, The Varnish, Los Angeles
Fragole e Aceto, Chris Ojeda, The Edison Los Angeles
Filibuster, Erik Adkins, Heaven’s Dog, San Francisco
English Breakfast, Marco Dionysos, Rye and HMS Cocktails, San Francisco
Still Life with Apples, After Cezanne, Daniel Hyatt, Alembic, San Francisco
Autumn Leaves, Jeffrey Morgenthaler, Clyde Common, Portland
Smoke Signals, Evan Zimmerman, Teardrop Lounge, Portland
Queena’s Arm, Murray Stenson, Zig Zag Cafe, Seattle
Starry Night, Jamie Boudreau, Knee High Stocking Company, Seattle
Saffron Sandalwood Sour, Anu Apte, Rob Roy, Seattle
Passage to India, David Wolowidnyk, West, Vancouver, BC
Each recipe was painstakingly created and tested and is described in precise detail to be successfully re-created both behind the bar and at home. Nearly half of the cocktails in Left Coast Libations involve homemade ingredients, including:
Lavender-Infused Honey Syrup
Maple Syrup Gastrique
Smoked Cider Air
Basil Foam
Five Spice–Infused Agave Nectar
Hibiscus Infused Vodka
Cardamom Tincture
Helpful end of the book resources include recipes for the mentioned homemade ingredients, as well as handy tips on everything from equipment and containers to filtering and storage, and a bar resource section.
From the nouveau speakeasies of Los Angeles and the culinary watering holes of San Francisco to the fine restaurant bars of Vancouver, and from the cutting-edge creativity of Portland bartenders to the classically-oriented stylings of Seattle’s drink slingers, authors Ted Munat and Michael Lazar have coaxed recipes and techniques from some of the finest bartenders plying the craft today. Left Coast Libations will inspire everyone from bartending neophytes to mixologist know-it-alls with its experimental spirit. Enthusiasts interested in joining the online artisanal cocktail community can visit the Left Coast Libations website (http://www.leftcoastlibations.com/ <http://www.leftcoastlibations.com/> ).
About the Authors
Ted Munat is a freelance cocktail writer based in Seattle, Washington. Under the moniker Le Mixeur, he has created a most irreverent blog (lemixeur.blogspot.com <http://lemixeur.blogspot.com/> ) and orchestrated a number of cocktail events promoting bartenders, craft cocktails, and a new cocktail community. Ted shares a mission with his loose federation of Munat Brothers to never pay for a drink again. This book is another surreptitious step in this devious plan.
Michael Lazar
100 cocktails and over 40 homemade ingredients: they had to be made, tasted, and tested, some several times. Michael Lazar, the mad kitchen scientist cum bartender for Left Coast Libations, did it all. Distillate of his experience can be found through- out this book in the form of notes and scribblings intended to enlighten both neophyte and professional. Further excerpts from his secret diaries can be found on his blog “Stirred, Not Shaken” along with his own original cocktail recipes and frequent musings on exotic citrus and semi-toxic cordials. No longer satisfied to simply test and write about cocktails, Michael now makes and serves them regularly to willing guests at venues (underground or otherwise) throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
PRAISE FOR LEFT COAST LIBATIONS
“If cocktails aren’t your thing, buy this book anyway. Munat is delightfully entertaining, and his keen wit, coupled with a little sarcasm and a touch of attitude, has served him well here. If cocktails are your thing you’ll get double your money’s worth with Left Coast Libations. It’s packed with fabulous formulas from all the big shots who hold forth from behind the mahogany on the west coast.”
–Gary Regan, author of The Joy of Mixology and the bartender’s GIN compendium
“I am so very pleasantly surprised to learn that not only do some of our Western Territories have bars, but—if we are to believe this amusing and informative little volume—the conduct of those institutions is frequently placed in the hands of individuals who thoroughly know their business. I should like to visit them some day.”
–David Wondrich, author of Imbibe
“Munat and Lazar’s book is the finest attempt anyone has made to reveal the movement that culinary cocktail-making has become.”
–Scott Beattie, author of Artisanal Cocktails
“With Left Coast Libations, you not only have the opportunity to discover many of the great cocktails which have sprung out of the West, but also get a chance to meet the bartenders who created them.”
–Robert Hess, creator of DrinkBoy.com <http://drinkboy.com/> , co-founder of the Museum of the American Cocktail
“By turns humorous, stylish and evocative, Munat and Lazar open the doors to the rich
world of American bartending west of the fly over zone.”
–Phil Duff, door 74, Amsterdam
