Fans pick 100 books like Drinking French

I just love how this book looks, first of all. It has an elegant, art deco, classy vibe that really sets the mood, and your mood is an important part of enjoying a good cocktail, or any drink for that matter.

There are some cocktails in here I know I'll never make, I'm not going to mix up my own bone tincture, but that doesn't matter. This isn't so much a recipe book for the home mixologist as it is a coffee-table collection of inspiring drinks.

When I leaf through the pages and look at all the gorgeous photographs, it sets me dreaming of which bars I want to visit next. That being said, it still features plenty of cocktails I'll want to whip up the next time I have guests over.

I write about beer, cider, spirits, and cocktails. In fact, I'll write about almost anything that will get you drunk, plus a few liquids that won't, but I don't write about wine. That's my off-duty drink, the one side of booze I don't need to know about beyond asking myself whether I want more of the wine in my glass.

So you could say that for me all wine is from another galaxy. It can seem too big, the world of wine. Too deep. Too stuffy. This book makes it fun again, makes it fresh and exciting. I almost want to learn about the stuff, despite my best efforts not to!

After reading this, I feel I'd happily follow Dan Keeling and Mark Andrew into any cellar to swill and swig the hours away.

No book can ever tell you, definitively, what tastes good. This one can tell you why certain things taste good to you, which is a much more interesting subject to dive into.

I found it fascinating to learn just how much all the other senses are involved when it comes to eating and drinking, it really is the most sensory-stimulating activity in our lives. Ok, perhaps the second most.

This book also goes into a subject that's close to my heart: learning to become a better taster. So many people seem to think your skill at this is fixed at birth. That's not true! If you're anything like me, then you'll love how this book opens up a whole dimension of aroma and flavour and makes your world all the richer for it.

Ok, you got me: this isn't a drinks book. But if you're interested in drinks, properly interested, I mean, above and beyond a fondness for getting drunk, then you're interested in flavour.

This book sets my mind racing about the combinations I could conjure up between drink, garnish, and snack. Just imagine, you open a page at random, and there's Segnit's pairing of caraway and poppy seed. Delicious! How much more so might it be next to a nice glass of Madeira, or perhaps something that's sat for a while in a sherry cask taking on all those flavours?

Another one: sesame and shiso. Ok. I know some gins flavoured with shiso. This could work. I flick through this book, and a million new paths open before me, leading me on to tasty treats.

This fascinating book plunges the reader into the avant-garde effervescence of the Roaring Twenties in Paris, presenting serious historical scholarship about the era alongside the author’s own take on classic cocktails like the Sazerac or the Highball. It provides, to quote the author Franck Audoux (in my book Makers Paris), “a kind of cultural snapshot of an era, to show how the cocktail, like jazz or the Charleston, participated in the reconstruction of a new society after the carnage of the First World War”.

One of the founders of the game-changing restaurant Le Châteaubriand, Franck is a pillar of the indie food and drinks scene here. This book is the fertile soil from which his current project, Cravan, grows. Named after Oscar Wilde’s nephew, the poet and boxer Arthur Cravan, Cravan is a contemporary cocktail bar rooted in the “French Modern.” 

Another beautiful book with beautiful photography by a dear friend in Paris, Rebekah Peppler. This James Beard nominated recipe book takes you through how to create a classic apéro through the seasons, and then inventive riffs. I’ve personally tried so many of these recipes and they have you dreaming and yearning for that moment with friends, setting suns, chilled glasses and the sound of crystal in celebration of another day.

From the dawn of cocktails, the opportunities for women to write bartending guides have historically been few and far between. Fortunately, this is now changing with the rise over the last few decades of female bartending talent.  Authors Ivy Mix and Lynnette Marrero are up there with the best of them today.

A Quick Drink is a compendium of the recipes contributed by the all-female contestants of their global bartending competition, Speed Rack.  It is both a lively read and a rare glimpse into the creative process behind the art of modern mixology.

I particularly love the way the recipes are positioned not only by the obvious category of drink but also by the time, place, ingredient, or mood that originally inspired them and consequently turned them into winners.

Mezcal is one of the fastest-growing spirits categories, and I love this smoky-tasting drink that's mostly made in small batches by one-man (or increasingly one-woman) distilleries around Mexico.

Author Emma Janzen loves it and is curious about it so much that she sets off on a journey around Mexico to meet the makers, and the bartenders who are turning mezcal into cocktails. I'm not jealous of her journey at all! The journey produced a handsome book with wonderful photos, and it's a book that has both style and substance.

What I like about it is that she gets out and meets people, and introduces the reader to their lives, whether it be cool mixologists in Oaxaca City or mezcal makers in the middle of nowhere. If you like mezcal, it's a must-read.

Australian bartender Chad Parkhill tells the origin stories of eighty iconic cocktails, mixing history and geography in this clever book that is at once a resource and drinks manual. Want to know how the G&T traveled from India to England? Or the history of the Kir Royale? This book shares it all so readers are sure to be the smartest guests at the next cocktail party. Vibrant, lush illustrations make the book extra-captivating. 

William T. Boothby’s bartending guide was published 29 years after the first cocktail recipe book written in 1862 by American barman/impresario Jerry Thomas. In my opinion, Cocktail Boothby’s offers a more mature vision of cocktail culture in the 19th and early 20th century’s Golden Age, serving as a boozy time machine back to the era when many classic cocktails – the Manhattan, the Martini, the Mint Julep, to name a few – were born. Along with a thorough compendium of recipes, the book includes Boothby’s “Valuable Suggestions” to bartenders (“Do not serve a frosted glass to a gentleman who wears a mustache”) and his “Ten Commandments” of bartending, as well as a selection of old advertisements and various handwritten recipes. The author’s celebration of, as he calls it, “the art of mixology”, never fails to delight me.