Search the largest collection of quality cocktail recipes.

Copyright 1995-2003, Cocktail.com Inc. All rights reserved. For more information, please e-mail us. Thank you for visiting our site.

Limp Libations

Title: Seagram's Bartending Guide
Publisher: Penguin Group

Rating: Gale Warning

Like a watered-down cocktail, Seagram's Bartending Guide looks and feels the way any other tried-and-true manual should: the hard cover, the colorful illustrations, the abundant recipes. But like a faux drink, the guide doesn't live up to its promise and falls woefully short of delivering the kind of direction a book of its caliber should.

It's a shame, really, that it turned out this way. No effort was spared to make the guide appear as professional as possible. It's decorated with wonderful photos of cocktails that beckon the reader to create them, it's got a useful foreword on how to stock a bar, and it's got informative sections on liqueurs -- in short, everything an aspiring tender needs to know.

Not so fast. Well, sure, you could learn a lot from this book -- if you know nothing to begin with about bartending. Yet this doesn't hold a candle to Mr. Boston or the Bartender's Bible, and the drinks are indeed watered down, making it nothing more than a cheap imitation of a standard.

Ironic, that the very Seagram's logo so proudly displayed on the book's cover -- boasting the three pledges of Integrity, Craftsmanship, Tradition -- are so flagrantly violated in the 266 pages of the Bartending Guide. Save your pennies and buy Mr. Boston instead.