With his active participation in the United States Bartenders Guild, New York Chapter (USBGNY) he has spent the past four years developing and solidifying relationships in the industry, affording him the opportunity to work with many of the most respected names in the business. His work has been featured in several magazines, and he recently wrote the cover story for Bar Business. Today, he is able to blend his educational training and passion by working as a spirits advocate and educator, consultant, brand ambassador and journalist. While developing his knack for identfying flavors on the plate he excelled when it came to working with spirits from distillation to the creation of cocktails. His passion, interest, and curious nature about food and spirits remained powerful influences. He then went on to graduate school at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he earned his Masters in Education, as well as the credentials he needed to be an English teacher. Here he had the opportunity to work with and learn from world-renowned chef Cal Stamenov, and sommelier Mark Jensen, formerly of the Highlands Inn. It wasn’t long, though, before he was recruited to open the Bernardus Lodge in Carmel Valley. He worked as a bartender through college at the award-winning Montrio in Monterey, CA. John went from dish washer, to busser, to waiter before finding his stride at the bar. Bitten by the hospitality bug in high school and continuing through college, he used his skills to move ahead when others may have thrown in the towel – literally. John Pomeroy is the epitome of balance – in life and in his cocktails. Professionals may benefit from some really excellent tricks and tips sprinkled throughout the text, in addition to the formalization of processes and vocabulary around tools, ingredients, and philosophies of drink creation. Home bartenders can take away from this book more about the why of cocktails and their ingredients than the what of them. Refreshingly, the book skips most of the basics of bartending and explaining cocktail categories, assuming the reader is familiar with them already. You probably already know that Fernet tastes minty and it can work together with mint in a drink and The Bartender’s Manifesto doesn’t spend much time naming a bunch of specific flavor combinations what it does is give names to potential tools to use when you’re in the situation of needing “a little something to make this drink pop.” In Recipe Flourishes, we learn several techniques for layering flavors “in a way that will transform a good drink into an extraordinary one.” These techniques are echoing, complementing, juxtaposition, and narrative arc, and they include tricks such as stacking ingredients with the same flavor note (like mint plus Fernet-Branca) or opposite ones (like a lemon peel on a bourbon drink). Or, rather than create a drink that stimulates emotions, you might create one that stimulates the mind and sparks curiosity – the “surprise and delight” experience in liquid form. Or perhaps you are designing drinks around comfort that can be evoked by playing up sense memories, well-wornm classics, and ritual serves. In the Drink Philosophies section, Maloney quickly covers material that will be familiar to professional bartenders who have collaboratively created menus: a drink might need to be invented to fill a hole on the menu for something stirred and savory with a gin base, for example, so that’s the starting point. This invites the reader to look closely at each recipe for what it can teach us, even if we never intend to make the drink ourselves. Other tips in the Cocktail Mechanics section include how each type of citrus twist impacts drinks differently (orange is warming and implies sweetness, for example), how cocktails should be “bottomed” with their splash of soda or champagne rather than topped with it, and why “texture is the single most important element of a cocktail.” At the end of each of the first four parts of the book are 25 recipes designed to demonstrate the manifestation of the concepts of that section. Drink recipes listed in the book refer to these distinct shakes and stirs in their instructions, reinforcing the lesson. Here these are divided into the collins shake (the drink upon straw-tasting after shaking might be slightly boozy, bold, and sweet) versus the perfectly ready cocktail resulting from a longer and more dilution-added coupe shake. A bartender should understand already that they should shake a cocktail that will later have added carbonated liquids to it for a shorter time than a cocktail that is going right into a coupe glass exactly as-is. He divides shaking and stirring into the coupe shake, collins shake, whip shake, coupe stir, chunk stir, and rocks stir. Sometimes this tool-building is formalizing vocabulary around processes we already know.
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