All Day Cocktails, Low (and No) Alcohol Magic by Shaun Byrne & Nick Tesar delves into sustainability, seasonality of produce with 50 prep recipes and 90 cocktail recipes.
All Day Cocktails by Shaun Byrne & Nick Tesar
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There’s no doubt that the low and no alcohol movement is here to stay. One only needs to look at the popularity of brands such as Seedlip, the range of Lyre’s non-alcoholic spirits providing zero proof cocktail alternatives and more recently Ceder’s non-alcoholic gin entering the Australian market.
Not long before the emergence of the zero-proof category, we had the renaissance of vermouth beyond a key ingredients in the Martini and Manhattan. Vermouth has taken up position in cocktail lists, contributing to the trend of delicious low ABV drinking.
All Day Cocktails, Low (and No) Alcohol Magic is not merely following a trend. The duo behind the book, Shaun Byrne & Nick Tesar have a track history in the category. After working together at the Gin Palace in Melbourne, Shaun co-founded Maidenii vermouth with Gilles Lapalus in 2011 and later in 2017, Nick and Shaun started Marionette Liqueurs, working with local farmers to produce premium and craft Australian liqueurs. Shaun also co-wrote The Book of Vermouth with Gilles Lapalus which we featured recently in our cocktail books series.
All Day Cocktails is not your average cocktail book. It begins with a chapter on sustainability, minimising waste and provides a table entitled “Drink Local”, which lists spirit categories and their Australian, European and North American equivalents.
The chapters are divided into produce namely citrus, berries, tropical fruits, stone fruits, pome fruits, vegetables, herbs and nuts. Each produce section begins with a description and its seasonal timeline, a prep recipe which could be a shrub, tepache, cordial or flavoured oil, followed by cocktail recipes that make use of the prep. A water drop icon besides a cocktail indicates it’s alcohol-free such as the Mandarin Shrub, a combination of mandarins, sugar and vinegar which is used in the cocktail recipes that follow.
Sustainability and seasonality are not buzzwords in this book, and to say that the authors are passionate about produce would be an understatement. For example, the instructions for making Mango Vermouth go as far as telling the reader that after removing as much flesh as possible, to scrape the remaining mango off the stone with their teeth, discard the stone with the skins in the compost and dehydrate the left over mango flesh after straining.
The cocktails range from riffs on classics such as the Celery Southside with gin, mint-stem cordial and acidulated celery juice, to combinations that seem unusual at first such as the non-alcoholic Must be Mad with pumpkin syrup, pineapple juice, apple cider vinegar and rosemary honey.
The best way to enjoy and put the All Day Cocktails to good use to select the desired produce that’s in season and be inspired by the flavour and techniques.
All Day Cocktails by Shaun Byrne & Nick Tesar is available in hardback and can be purchased through Amazon.
