The Home Bar: A Guide To Designing, Equipping and Stocking Your Own Bar, by Henry Jeffreys
Foreword by: Alexandre Ricard
Book Review by: Warren Bobrow: The Cocktail Whisperer
The Home Bar, A Guide to Designing, Equipping and Stocking Your Own Bar, written by the elegant and talented Henry Jeffreys is perhaps the most deeply intriguing home bartending guide I’ve ever enjoyed reading and then critiquing. This may sound like a broad reach, at least on a literary standpoint, but I digress. This book is an all-in-one guide to the outlandishly expensive and the studied. The knowing and the unknowing consumer of high-end spirits guide to the best things in life. From the handsome end to end cover photography to the carefully laid out rear photography, with just the right amount of written information, it’s clear that this book was created to impress more than just the casual lager drinker. It’s a richly studied design tome, with crisply worded explanations and historical references that allow the reader to become part of the ultra-riche, opulently luxurious, photographically gorgeous, narrative of this unique book. The stories are so pleasurable to read, and they beg the addition of more exotic spirits into your home and eventually your belly. Sure, these are not your basement wreck-room, dive bar scenes that are visual pleasures, but carefully curated scenarios that evoke the finest in professional cocktail bars-but designed for the home and some cases, small apartment settings. Case in point, the completely, over the top, home bar of Alexandre Ricard, each luxury design element, reminiscent of ultra-riche cocktail bars on the Right Bank in Paris, intellectual in scope, yet encouraging just one more drink of the finest craft spirits that money can buy. Another Absinthe garcon, please!