The underground cocktail books that changed the industry

The turn of the century ushered in an era of craft cocktails that completely changed the bartending scene. A handful of cocktail books helped shaped this renaissance, including The Craft of the Cocktail by Dale DeGroff, The Joy of Mixology by Gary Regan, The PDT Cocktail Book by Jim Meehan and Chris Gall, and Death & Co by David Kaplan and Nick Fauchald and Alex Day. But there are two volumes that you have likely never seen that influenced the nation’s best bartenders even more than those tomes: Beta Cocktails and Rogue Cocktails, which are, as this Vine Pair article states, the “polemical work of two fed-up New Orleans bartenders.”

Beta Cocktails emerged in 2009, and only contained about 50 recipes, but those recipes shook the cocktail world. The book was the brainchild of bartenders Kirk Estopinal and Maksym Pazuniak and was self-published because the authors thought trying to find a publisher would just slow down the process. “We had to get this idea over with and get it out there,” says Estopinal, who considered the book to be a “punk-rock move.” Fewer than 500 copies exist.

Despite this dearth of copies – or perhaps because of it – the book took on underground cult status, and the novel recipes turned the cocktail world upside down. Estopinal was inspired by a stint at Chicago bar The Violet Hour, and by the 1946 tome The Gentleman’s Companion by Charles Baker, required reading for all bartenders working at the bar. In The Gentleman’s Companion, Estopinal was intrigued by a recipe for an Angostura Sour, which calls for an ounce and a half of Angostura bitters, an ingredient usually measured in drops or dashes, not ounces. Back in New Orleans, he mixed up the cocktail for his colleague, who was amazed by it. “That kicked off all these ideas in my head,” remembers Pazuniak. “If we can make a cocktail with two ounces of Ango, we can do anything. You could make the modifier the star of the show.”

With that seed planted, the duo created recipes that featured ingredients like Cynar, Fernet Branca, and Campari in starring roles rather than merely being an accent. Bartenders across the world took note, and began riffing off the ideas. One cocktail in this mold comes from Toby Maloney, the founder of The Violet Hour. His recipe, the Eeyore’s requiem cocktail pictured above, contains a whopping 1 1/2 ounces of red bitter apéritif, along with Cynar, Fernet Branca, and orange bitters.