Slow Drinks - by Danny Childs (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

WINNER OF THE 2024 JAMES BEARD AWARD FOR BEST BEVERAGE WITH RECIPES BOOK

Slow Drinks teaches home cooks, industry pros, homebrewers, and foragers how to transform botanical ingredients--whether foraged or purchased from the store--into incredibly unique beverages and cocktails.

Organized by season, Slow Drinks demonstrates how to make drinks that tell a story of botany, history, culture, and terroir, while honoring beverage traditions both old and new. Each season will highlight eight new ingredients with recipes that build on a basics chapter and teach readers how to interchangeably use master recipes to make their own meads, country wines, beers, sodas, tinctures, shrubs, and more.

Beautifully photographed by the author's wife, Katie Childs, and illustrated by Molly Reader, Slow Drinks will be the definitive botanist's guide to mixology that can live in your basket on a foraging trip, or on the coffee table as a conversation piece.

This book is for bartenders, do-it-yourselfers, foodies, homesteaders, homebrewers, food activists, and anyone looking to dive into the world of botanical drink making.

Review Quotes

"Slow Drinks reminds us that the cocktail began its career as medicine, an amalgam of spirits, herbs, and syrups intended to mollify the soul and recharge the body. The traditional insights into the plants, distillates, and digestive decoctions have been gathered here, and the cocktail reframed within the Slow Food ethic of good, clean, and fair food. No dry academic survey this, but an engaging personal exploration of botany, material culture, and folk wisdom that contributed to shaping the iconic beverages. The splendidly illustrated profiles of ingredients charm the eye while the text supplies plant lore mingled with scientific botany. Brillat-Savarin said that pleasure is enhanced by knowing what you ingest. Slow Drinks will enrich your every sip." -David Shields, author of The Culinarians

"[Slow Drinks] taps into techniques both ancient and modern. And along with unexpected and exquisitely fresh flavors, readers can gain powerful benefits from incorporating locally foraged plants in their drinks." - Marisa Procopio, Edible New Jersey

"Danny Childs approaches bartending with the natural curiosity of an anthropologist and the heart of a farmer, so it's no surprise that his book, Slow Drinks, serves as a rich antidote to the industrial drinks machine. So much more than a collection of recipes, this book invites us to rediscover the ordinary ingredients that grow in our backyards and urges us to cultivate a more holistic relationship with the seasons. With entertaining foraging stories, customizable recipes, and practical tips--all illuminated by Katie Childs' evocative photography--the journey of slowing down and reveling in the process becomes just as delicious as the marvelous drinks." -Emma Janzen, author of Mezcal and co-author of The Way of the Cocktail

"Danny Childs is uniquely situated to shepherd readers from farms and foraging trips into the kitchen, where he combines those ingredients into spirited history lessons and handcrafted mixes. Slow Drinks is a deeply researched modern cookbook that sows the seeds for a seasonal mixology practice grounded in farm to table tenets like no bartending book has before." -Jim Meehan, author of The PDT Cocktail Book and Meehan's Bartender Manual

"Danny Childs takes beverage making to a whole new level by drawing upon his ethnobotanical, foraging, and bartending experience.?His innovative?approach to drinks of all kinds provides a superb complement to the Slow Food movement". -Patrick E. McGovern, author of?Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages

"Danny Childs' fascinating journey is both universal and unique: He traveled extensively before coming home to New Jersey to see a familiar place with new appreciation. Slow Drinks is as much a love letter to his home state and its botanical bounty as it is a thoughtful and creative guide to making very good drinks from scratch, from the plants that grow wherever you are. From juniper to sumac, crabapples to pawpaws, Slow Drinks offers techniques that can be applied broadly, as well as crafted recipes for drinks that will capture the time in which they were collected and the place where you live." - Marie Viljoen, author of Forage, Harvest, Feast

"Fans of bitters and amari are going to love using the tips in this book to create seasonal versions of their favorite beverages. Danny Childs provides readers with information on specific botanicals and a toolkit of techniques with which to preserve them in the form of sodas, shrubs, liqueurs, and more. Slow Drinks serves up both specific recipes and endless possibilities." -Camper English, author of Doctors and Distillers: The Remarkable Medicinal History of Beer, Wine, Spirits, and Cocktails

"It turns out that years of ethnobotanical research in the Peruvian Amazon and the mountains and deserts of Chile can serve as the perfect foundation for?building?a bar program in southern New Jersey.?Slow Drinks?isn't just a collection of extraordinary cocktail recipes, but a guide to understanding and?appreciating?the flora we have all around us--wherever we?live. -Nicholas Gill, co-author of Central and the Latin American Cookbook

"Of course, Childs' background as an ethnobotanist and anthropologist leads him to all kinds of experimentation, and the Cel Rey was no exception." -Adam H. Callaghan, PUNCH

"So many of the bottles we reach for when concocting drinks and cocktails can seem like black boxes hidden behind megalithic brand names and secret recipes, making it easy to forget the rich histories of preservation that led to their creation in the first place. Danny Childs breaks down those walls, and with a methodical attention to detail, presents traditional recipes for fermentation along with inventive applications for them. Raise a glass to this gem of a book that feels as much like a reference guide as it does an inspiration." -David Zilber, author of The Noma Guide to Fermentation

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