The Bartender’s Pantry: A Beverage Handbook for the Universal Bar

A professional guide that surveys and celebrates the culinary ingredients in mixed drinks, with more than 100 recipes from the world’s most creative bartenders and the James Beard Award-winning author of Meehan’s Bartender Manual.

Jim Meehan’s achievements as a pioneering bartender at Gramercy Tavern, The Pegu Club, and PDT in New York City helped pave the path for this generation’s craft cocktail industry. Here, he’s partnered with artist and designer Bart Sasso of Sasso & Co. and Atlanta’s beloved Ticonderoga Club, award-winning author and journalist Emma Janzen, and renowned photographer AJ Meeker on an advanced handbook focused on the zero-proof components of cocktails that make or break the integrity of a drink.

The Bartender’s Pantry includes concise overviews of ten categories of ingredients--sugars, spices, dairy, grains and nuts, fruits, vegetables, flowers and herbs, coffee, tea, soda and mineral water, and ferments--that cover each subject’s modern history in drinks, popular production practices, artisan processing methods, and common distribution channels before suggesting sourcing and service insights from experts in each field. The primers grapple with the challenges producers, distributors, and consumers each face as the ingredient moves through the food chain and into the bartender’s pantry.

Each chapter features artfully illustrated recipes incorporating the featured ingredients that bring the reader into the kitchens of some of the world’s most revered bartenders, baristas, importers, and chefs. Their innovative takes on traditional recipes including horchata, matcha, Turkish coffee, sorrel, kvass, and ice cream are followed by full-page photos of over 50 cocktails that incorporate them including modern classics like the Gin Basil Smash, Earl Grey MarTEAni and Penicillin.

Inspired by kitchen references like Deborah Madison’s Vegetable Literacy and Harold McGee’s Keys to Good Cooking, The Bartender’s Pantry is an indispensable handbook for hospitality professionals, curious cooks, and anyone interested in how novel and traditional global beverages are connected to international foodways and our wellbeing itself.

Jim Meehan’s interdisciplinary career spans more than two decades from Madison, Wisconsin to New York City to Portland, Oregon, where he writes and works with hospitality clients, spirits companies, and product partners through his consultancy Mixography Inc. After editing multiple editions of Food & Wine Cocktails and Mr. Boston Official Bartender’s Guide, Jim authored the Tales of the Cocktail Spirit Award-winning The PDT Cocktail Book and the James Beard Award-winning Meehan’s Bartender Manual.

Emma Janzen Emma Janzen is an award-winning journalist and author who writes about spirits and cocktails for outlets including The New York Times, PUNCH, Eater and more. The recipient of two James Beard Foundation awards and two Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards, sheco-authored The Way of the Cocktail with Julia Momosé and The Bartender’s Manifesto with Toby Maloney; authored Mezcal: The History, Craft & Cocktails of the World’s Ultimate Artisanal Spirit; and has contributed to other texts including The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails. Currently the Drinkways Editor for Good Beer Hunting, she also serves as the Midwest Academy Chair for The World’s 50 Best Bars.

Bart Sasso is a multidisciplinary creative whose agency, Sasso & Co, develops identity, branding, packaging, and commercial art for companies like Tip Top Cocktails, PortoVino, Jon David Headrick Selections, Schenker Beer Company, and many more. Sasso is also a partner and the creative director of Ticonderoga Club, a critically acclaimed, genre-defying tavern in Atlanta, Georgia. His work has appeared in newspapers and magazines such as Esquire, Wildsam Field Notes, Forbes, Eater, The Wall Street Journal, Bon Appetit and Garden & Gun.