Dylan March - The Book of Dangerous Cocktails: Adventurous Recipes for Serious Drinkers

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: http://us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. The drinks in this book are potentially dangerous if used without appropriate precautions. Please use caution when consuming alcoholic beverages, especially alcoholic beverages that contain marijuana.

The mixture of alcohol and marijuana may affect you in unexpected ways. Please only consume these drinks in the safety of your own home. When making drinks that include fire or infusing liquor, keep all combustible materials safely away from your workspace. not use any flame, including from a gas stove, when infusing liquor. Always keep a fire extinguisher handy. ). ).

Thats right, were not messing around. Were serious cocktail people, and Dylan even has professional cred, having worked as a craft bartender in NYC for eight years. Jen, a cookbook author, used to be a regular at one of his bars, and after many late nights watching him shoot absinthe out of his mouth while lighting it on fire (please dont try that at home (or anywhere), folks) The Book of Dangerous Cocktails was born. What is a dangerous cocktail? Its simply a drink thats delicious, a tad mysterious, and either dangerously easy to drink or dangerous to drink too many of. Along with original cocktail recipes and classics with a twist, weve included party punches, flamers (drinks you can light on fire), and boozy shooters. And in the last chapter, well give you drinks you can make with the most badass weapon in your cocktail arsenal: weed-infused liquor.

So strap yourself in and get ready for a ridenot so much a rollercoaster, but an informative, boozy riverboat tour with two snarky yet enthusiastic guides who met at a bar. Before we get to the cocktails, though, we have some basic knowledge to drop about the kinds of booze and mixers you should be buying to make the cocktails, how to properly construct them, and how to infuse weed into any bottle of liquor on hand.

When making cocktails, nothing is more important than having the right ingredients. Anyone who bought a giant plastic bottle of vodka to get them through the weekends at college knows how shitty cheap booze can be. So spring for the good stuff. When youre at the liquor store, you dont necessarily have to buy the most expensive bottle on the shelf, but do spend the extra money to buy a spirit that is made from quality ingredients, aged an appropriate amount of time, and given personal attention from someone who cares about the way it tastes.

Small-batch liquors from local distilleries not only taste better, their variances in flavor due to regional ingredients and tastes can lead you to discover something about a spirit you never realized. In other words, spending a little more on high-quality booze actually makes you a better drinker! And if being a more-refined human being isnt enough to rationalize buying high-quality booze, you should also know that a good collection of liquors, liqueurs, and yes, some bitters is even sexier than a good collection of vintage porn. How much liquor you decide to keep on hand is up to you. Dylan keeps a rather modest home bar, with a relatively small collection of curated spirits, including one or two good bottles of gin, rye, bourbon, and scotch, as well as a variety of liqueurs and other modifiers to play around with. When he finishes a bottle of something, he replaces it with something else hed like to try. Meanwhile, Jen always has a couple days supply of weed and probably just enough booze to make sure that if she brings a guy home, he doesnt have a reason to leave before the night is through.

But even though shes not the type of person to keep vermouth, fernet, and elderflower liqueur around the house, she does like to pick a cocktail or two to make when having parties, and theres no better gift for special occasions than infusing a bottle of mezcal with weed. Following is a comprehensive list of all the liquors, modifiers, and more we use in this book. By no means do we expect you to buy them all! But use this list as a quick reference for our preferred brands and as a cipher for some of our more exotic ingredients (what? you dont know what Ouzo is?). Or, you know, read it if youre just one of those people who likes to know stuff.

Ah, vodka. For many of us, it ushered us into this fantastical world called drunkenness, with practically no aftertaste and with almost as many available flavors as a Kool-Aid.

But vodka can be for grown-ups, toojust ask anyone from the Eastern Bloc. And while youre at it, ask them to get you a locally made bottle of potato vodka the next time theyre home. Theyre so tasty, with distinct vegetal notes, that youll want to sip them like whiskey. If you dont have an overseas connection, we recommend Boyd & Blair, which makes their vodka with small batches of potatoes. For corn vodka, which has a sweeter finish and is much easier to find in the US, we recommend Spring44.

If youre like Jen, you didnt have much of a taste for gin until one night when you tried it again, and then wanted to drink nothing else ever again. If youre like Jen, you didnt have much of a taste for gin until one night when you tried it again, and then wanted to drink nothing else ever again.

Gin is made primarily from juniper berries, but also contains a variety of botanicals like coriander, sage, orange peel, cucumber, and rosemary. A distillery tweaking the amounts and kinds of botanicals based on their personal tastes and whats locally available can have a major impact on the taste of gin, so make sure to keep an eye out for small batches for experimentation purposes, especially if youre looking for a good gin to infuse with weed. Many of the drinks youll find in this book contain navy strength gin. Dating back to the eighteenth century, navy strength gin was drunk by sailors in the British Royal Navy to fight scurvy. The Brits decreed that it needed to be 114 proof (57 percent alcohol by volume) to be truly effective, and to get everyone truly fucked up. There are lots of great distilleries that make navy strength gin, but our favorites are New York Distilling Company (which makes Perrys Tot Gin) and Plymouth.

Plymouth gin is bit sweeter, and Perrys Tot is more clean and dry. We also love the gins made by Spring44. Their Mountain Gin is perfect for infusing weed, and they also make an Old Tom gin (barrel-aged, malty, sweeter) that is simply delicious. In chapter two, weve adapted a bunch of gin-based cocktailssome classics, some originalsfor navy strength gin to give them an extra dose of booziness. Navy strength gin is considerably dryer and hotter, so if you cant handle it, simply scale them back down to regular strength.