Book Review: Paddy Drinks: The World of Modern Irish Whiskey Cocktails by Jillian Vose, Jack McGarry, Sean Muldoon, and Conor Kelly

One of the great ironies of the bar world is how so many people love an Irish pub but those same people don’t think much of Irish whiskey. Take my father, an Italian-American who came of age in the 1940s and 50s, quite adept at mixing his Rob Roys and Rusty Nails, and who found it unthinkable not to have a bottle of blended Scotch in the house. But Irish whiskey? He’d practically spit if you suggested it—and this from a man who married quite a lovely Irish-American woman.

Here’s the thing, though: He never had many choices at his disposal to learn more about what makes the spirit so delicious and so very versatile, especially when you start to dig into the different categories within the category, as co-author and head bartender for the Dead Rabbit Jillian Vose so sagely points out.

In Paddy Drinks: The World of Modern Irish Whiskey Cocktails by Vose, New York’s Dead Rabbit owners Jack McGarry and Sean Muldoon, and High West distiller Conor Kelly, you will get schooled on all-things Irish whiskey (one of the fastest-growing spirits categories in the world right now), and not a minute too soon. Or late, perhaps. How is this the first book ever to extensively cover Irish whiskey and Irish whiskey-based cocktails?! (Yes, that exclamation point is meant to punctuate incredulousness!) The answer lies in the struggle the Irish people and, subsequently, their whiskey--one of their many excellent gifts to the civilized world—underwent over the twentieth century, enduring the Great Hunger, a mass exodus, a battle for independence from British rule, American Prohibition, among other trials, all of which combined to become the pugilist to give the once-thriving Irish whiskey industry a sucker punch to the gut.

You will learn so much in these pages, starting with the excellent foreword by one Dave Wondrich, some random unknown who fancies himself a booze historian (kidding!), who knows a thing or two about pulling together the crumpled napkin, scrawled-on-a-matchbook, he-went-that-a-way past of drinks and drinking into cohesiveness. He weaves through the history that the Irish bar played in American drinking and cocktail culture, starting from the mid-17th century to the rise of great Irish American barmen in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and their influence on whiskey cocktails (go team Waldorf-Astoria!).

Background

You might say this book was born long before the Dead Rabbit found its home on Water Street at the tip of Manhattan when McGarry and Muldoon wandered into New York’s famed Death & Co., where Vose was the head bartender. She’d created an entire cocktail list entitled “Paddy Drinks.” Paddy, of course, is a term not always used endearingly in this country, and it caught their attention. And suspicion—who’d this Vose think she was, anyway? As it turns out, her mother is Irish-Irish, and the talented Vose knows exactly who she is—an incredibly talented, hard-working bar pro with a love of uisce beatha. To their great surprise and wonder, the list was full of, “… extraordinarily well-constructed and well-executed cocktails based around bottlings like Clontarf, Redbreast 12, and Connemara peated. It was a revelation.” They’d eventually hire her away to become their head bartender at the Dead Rabbit, currently the bar with the largest Irish whiskey collection in the United States, and the rest is history—or, history in the making, as Muldoon and McGarry hint in these pages of expanding their Irish bar empire nationally. Perhaps there’s a Dead Rabbit or an incarnation of it coming to a city near you.

After the ancient and contemporary history lessons, you also get a tidy schooling in Irish whiskey styles, with clear, solid explanations of the distilling process, the particularities of Ireland’s versions of that in pot and column stills, and the differences between the four types: pot still, malt, grain, and blended, and further breakdown of their characteristics using myriad whiskey brands to delve deeper. There are also some really terrific charts expanding upon the characteristics that different wood types and barrels that held myriad other liquids (port, sherry, rum, zinfandel, bourbon, sauternes, etc.) have on whiskey, the traits of aroma, flavor, and body in different styles of Irish whiskey, what other spirits they cleave to in drinks, and how to best use them in stirred or shaken cocktails, along with the requisite helpful information on glassware, tools, techniques (four different shaking methods explained), garnish, and ice.

Cocktails

And then there are the cocktails—90 of them in total, divided into two main sections, in which there are scattered little biscuit bites of information about the distilleries, the whiskey styles, the history, etc.: “Classics,” like the Dead Rabbit’s famed Irish Coffee (truly—it’s the best one), the Emerald, and the Wild Irish Rose, and “Dead Rabbit Original Cocktails,” which is where you will likely spend all your time. Nicely broken down into sub-sections of Single Grain Irish Whiskey Cockails, Single Malt Irish Whiskey Cocktails, Single Pot Still Irish Whiskey Cocktails, and Blended Irish Whiskey Cocktails, use of this book will not only have you drinking better, but it will open a whole world of particularity in flavor. And you’ll never look at an Irish whiskey bottle the same again. Drinks like the Love Shack (shout out to its creator, the wonderful barman and Dead Rabbit alum, Greg Buda), a kind of hyper-jacked up, incredibly complex whiskey sour that combines Teeling Blackpits peated single malt with pimento bitters, sunflower orgeat, coriander-infused Glenmorangie, lemon juice, half-and-half, egg white, and soda water, the latter uplifting all the notes of spice, citrus, and smoke, and the Bare Faced Liar, created by Vose to tease out the floral, lighter notes in a Connact Balyhoo Single Grain whiskey, along with complements of toasted fennel salt, lemon juice, beet and raspberry syrups, Dubonnet Rouge, and bitters.

It's not a book to carelessly pop open and say, okay, I’ll make this tonight! Not unless at all times you have the ability to whip up a homemade cilantro tincture, pistachio orgeat, and have an Irish whiskey collection to rival the Rabbit’s. Although this book might inspire you to certainly expand the Irish whiskey you do have on hand. It requires a little more time, planning, and ingredient respect. But your patience will be richly rewarded with delicious knowledge and incredible drinks.

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