The Bar World’s Best Competition Now Has Its Own Cocktail Book
You can now make cocktails created by Speed Rack's founders and stars in your own home.
Speed Rack—the high-speed women-only bartending competition and breast cancer charity fundraiser—has become, over the past 14 years, the bar world’s best spectator sport.
Attending the finals or semifinals is like being at any big sports playoff game, with all the cheering and hollering and contagious adrenaline.
It’s also where you can hear zingers from the judges like “A floating lime peel in a drink is like a dead body in a kiddie pool to me.”
And now, Speed Rack has its own cocktail-recipe book: A Quick Drink: The Speed Rack Guide to Winning Cocktails for Any Mood.
I’m going to go ahead and say it’s the most practical and useful and usable cocktail book of the season, for both bar pros and home enthusiasts.
The book features cocktails created by familiar faces from the competition and compiled by Speed Rack founders Lynnette Marrero and Ivy Mix, along with Megan Krigbaum. They’re divided by type into chapters like “Liquid Vacation” (tropical-style drinks) or “Some Like it Hot” (“Beyond the Spicy Margarita”). Each recipe is accompanied by a one-sentence description in the style of how a judge might order it at the competition (for instance: “We’d like your herbaceous rendition of a classic Paloma”). And—my favorite aspect—the drinks are made with commonly available ingredients, and few call for subrecipes more complicated than a flavored simple syrup.
These aren’t the drinks the women created on the fly in the competition, mind you. Many are signature cocktails, and all were crafted and carefully refined to serve at the creators’ respective bars. I’ve already clocked a few personal favorites in here.
In addition to its more-than-100 cocktail recipes, the book includes information useful to a range of readers, from considerations when stocking a home bar to advice on infusing ingredients with chile peppers or instructions for efficiently building a round of drinks.
It’s the rare cocktail book that’s appropriate for all levels of drink-makers. A cocktail novice can learn how to nail the classics and beyond. An advanced home enthusiast can move past the basics to make drinks they might have sipped at their favorite bars. An early-career bar pro can learn how to create their own drinks and crush it at Speed Rack.
Honestly, it’s the cocktail book I’ll be recommending and giving as gifts for anyone who wants to take their cocktail-making to the next level.
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The Sidecar
More from Ivy Mix this week: She, Piper Kristensen, and Conor McKee are opening a casual wine bar in Crown Heights today, called Whoopsie Daisy, which will also offer highballs and stirred, spirit-forward cocktails as well as bar bites like cheese-and-charcuterie plates.