Death & Co Welcome Home: [A Cocktail Recipe Book]

by Alex Day, Nick Fauchald, David Kaplan

The ultimate guide to choosing ingredients, developing your palate, mixing drinks, and leveling up your home cocktail game - with more than 600 recipes - from the bestselling team behind Death & Co: Modern Classic Cocktails and James Beard Book of the Year Cocktail Codex: Fundamentals, Formulas, Evolutions

Genres: Cocktails, Cookbooks, Reference, Food and Drink, Cooking

313 pages, Hardcover

Published November 16, 2021

Reviews

[Rich Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second one is the best, but it is still very good.

[Ash Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall I did like this book and there are a ton of great recipes. I think it tried to do a little too much maybe, it felt a little disjointed and unclear on the target audience (professionals vs home mixologist). They do acknowledge a lot of the cocktail recipes are not really feasible to replicate at home, but it’s again unclear if this book is really targeted at home bars and what I’m supposed to do with a hundred cocktails I can’t make at home (major props though for sharing their recipes). The sections on liquors have tasting exercises to learn the differences between varieties of a given liquor, but once again it’s not really doable for someone who doesn’t have access to a full bar stock / doesn’t want to buy four variations of each liquor to do a taste test. It’s definitely a beautifully designed book and looks amazing nestled among my liquor bottles, but it’s more of a novelty than an essential in my opinion.

[Danielle T · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded to 4.

I have yet to read the other Death & Co books, and checked this out for my husband who bartends. Welcome Home is a strange mix of intro-to-barkeeping (though they say those come from their actual handbook for new bartenders at their bars), how to build a business, and then recipes. The budding bartender learning about palate is unlikely to be thinking about menu building, but overall this still has a lot of interesting information.

Due to my current conditions, I did not try any of the recipes so I cannot comment on that. They are very specific to the liquor for capturing specific flavor combinations, so availability may depend on where you live and access. I like the idea of using centrifuges to clarify and syrups to prep but again, some of this may be more for the professional bartender than the home hobbyist (though it could be fun to do some of the specialized infusions and batches!)

[Tony Mush · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some cool cocktails but the index could have been way better organized. It doesn't list what pages you can go back to if you are looking to use for a specific thing. Example 'vodka' only refers you back to the very beginning of the book where they give tasting notes of vodka and their preferred brands. But no listing of which pages/recipes used vodka.

This makes I very difficult to choose a cocktail recipe based on an ingredient you already have. Say I make the watermelon simple syrup, there is no reference back to what pages and recipes I could then use with the watermelon simple syrup.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is more like the first of D&C’s books than the ever-useful Cocktail Codex. It has a lot of business and drink development content, and half of the book is specs that unless you loved a certain of their cocktails, and bought all of the obscure stuff to make IT, you probably won’t be able to make. But the palate-development section is useful, as is a section with some good freezer door cocktail batching tips..

[Dale · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tough book to review. The writing sections are fantastic and you learn a lot. The recipe section is way to ingredient intensive. You have to have hundreds of different speciality ingredients. I don’t think I was able to make a single drink without intense prep or sourcing.

I was hoping the home edition would have had more accessible recipes. So it’s good on teaching but bad on recipes.

[Cristhian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Más que un cocktail book es un manual de entrenamiento para entrar a Death & Co