Camper English

1 month ago | alcademics.com | Camper English

I am reading The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld by Herbert Asbury for the first time as I research San Francisco cocktail history.   (You can buy it on [amazon] [bookshop] to support this blog.) My impression of this book is that the “informal” part of the history is important to note - you’d need to fact check it if you’d want to use the information academically.

1 month ago | alcademics.com | Camper English

My first story for Food & Wine just went live. I took advice from 95 years of cocktail etiquette books, beginning in 1930 and ending with the publication of How to Be a Better Drinker last week [amazon] [bookshop]. I had fun going through my cocktail book collection to find other etiquette books, including The Official Preppy Handbook, to cite. Anyway, check out the story here!

1 month ago | foodandwine.com | Camper English

Photo: Food & Wine / Camper English / Getty Images In February, star drink influencer Hannah Chamberlain launched her first cocktail book, How to Be a Better Drinker: Cocktail Recipes and Boozy Etiquette. The book is filled with fresh spins on classic drinks, including a Margarita/Paloma mashup and an Espresso Martini with Guinness syrup. Also included is advice like “How to Treat Your Bartender” and “Seven Virtues of Good Guests,” the boozy etiquette promised in the title.

1 month ago | alcademics.com | Camper English

I am keeping all the year’s new drink books on this post: But I wanted to make sure that you saw just the new updates so I’ll repeat then here.

2 months ago | alcademics.com | Camper English

I just finished reading The Hour of Absinthe: A Cultural History of France's Most Notorious Drink [amazon] [bookshop] by Dr. Nina Studer. The book is an academic look at parts of absinthe’s history. (I wrote another blog post about one aspect of it - that wine was considered a better base spirit than grain or sugar beets.) Two additional facts stuck out to me about the medicinal history of absinthe I learned in the book.