NEW FROM MIXELLANY!
BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE
Finding and translating Kokuteeru (1924) was a year long journey that helps to answer the question "who wrote the first Japanese cocktail book?" Whilst this honour goes to Tokuzo Akiyama's book Cocktails: How To Mix Drinks, Yonekichi Maeda's Kokuteeru is considered to be the more systematic and practical text which was published a month later. Western style spirits and bartending made their way into Japanese culture as early as 1872. Kokuteeru gives us a fascinating glimpse as to how 1920s Japanese bartenders began to define themselves and their profession. The entirety of the net profits-100%- from the publication of this English translation of Kokuteeru will fund the Yonekichi Maeda Scholarship: an internship program that will send Australian bartenders to Japan to learn about Japanese bartending. This scholarship will allow the next generation of Australian bartenders to learn the art of Japanese cocktail bartending and will promote a return of the 'journeyman bartender' to the education scheme of the bartending profession.
THIS IS THE LONG-AWAITED BOOK written by Mr. Dick Bradsell. AKA Soho Cocktail Legend, Father of the London Cocktail revival, The Bartenders' Bartender, Cocktail King, Creative Genius, are some of the titles attributed to him-though he would have introduced himself as Dick or perhaps Rosie Smudge or Cassandra the Wizard or Dungeon Master or.... This is not a cocktail book or a bar manual. Dick believed that others were better at writing those than him. Although incomplete and missing his final signature of approval, this book of thoughts, soundbites and (many) cocktails is part of his legacy.
Compiled and carefully reconstructed from his own writings, his words (and his opinions) from his incalculable notebooks, personal letters, and scraps of paper span almost four decades are reproduced in the raw so all the feeling and emotion of his thoughts are left in their finest unedited, unpolished form. Photos from private collections and his own artwork are sprinkled throughout as playful as they appeared in his notebooks. A tribute to his family and many friends who shaped his tread in life and supported him for better and for worse, in mind, spirit, and body. Ultimately, it is a celebration of the life and work of a proud British bartender, named Richard Arthur Bradsell.