I’m delighted to finally share details about my next book, The Bartender’s Library: A Guide to Curating Spirits and Creating Cocktails from the Multnomah Whiskey Library. This is another collaboration with my friend Brett Adams, my co-author on Raising the Bar, and also published by Chronicle. This time we got to work with photographer Nicola Parisi, who did an incredible job capturing the cocktails, spirits, and overall feel of the Library. Publication day is October 13 and you can pre-order it now from your favorite bookstore, including our local Powell’s.

Other than my own living quarters, there’s no place in Portland where I’ve spent more time than the Multnomah Whiskey Library. I came on as a fill-in bartender for what was supposed to be just the holiday season in, I think, 2014. Somehow that stretched into more than a decade of staying on board as a regular bartender or at least occasionally picking up a shift, taking on what I jokingly called a “substitute teacher” role there when they needed some temporary coverage.

Brett is the actual teacher in his role as education manager and spirits curator. He has the enviable job of curating the Library’s collection of about 2,500 bottles. This project is our attempt at distilling the experience of visiting the Library into book form, providing an education in spirits, advice on how to curate a collection of any size, ideas for flights, and recipes for about 70 of our house cocktails. We get to go into much more depth and get more complex with the cocktails in this book than we did in Raising the Bar. You could think of that as your 101 textbook and this as your 202, though these are way more fun than your average your textbook and you definitely don’t need the first one to enjoy The Bartender’s Library. It’s written for anyone who wants to learn more about spirits and connect how they’re made with how they taste in the glass. I can’t wait to share it with you and hopefully see you at our book events later this year.