fit into two categories: 1) information on the history and production of a specific liquor, such as Tequila, and 2) books professing to have the 100-500-1000 essential recipes for any occasion. And there are a smattering of personal anecdote books, quips and sayings about drinking, and recently some that might be labeled social anthropology books recounting drinking in times gone by. But frankly if there were some great book out there on how to drink, I wouldn't be spending time on this website, I'd be drinkin' out of it!

There are only two books worth reading for the amateur drinker:

RECIPES FOR MIXED DRINKS by Hugo Ensslin.
THIS is the Dead Sea Scrolls of drink. It is available in an inexpensive reprint. This bartender of a second tier hotel bar in NYC self pubished this thin volume of recipes that he had concocted over the years. In it are the original Aviation and any number of other drinks whose origin cannot be traced back further, but for which many after take credit. This unassuming simplicity here is breathtaking. It really is all you need.

THE GENTLEMAN'S COMPANION vol ii by Charles H. Baker Jr (Crown).
This may as well be a novel - one that fits somewhere in the Romancing the Stone genre. The shape is that of a recipe book, but as he says recipes do not interest him. And in fact he has found most to be as I have found them to be - thoughtless. So he promises that nothing is include that he has not tested repeatedly AND that those tests have been in the field. And by field he means just that. If he talks about a Daquiri then he is in the Florida Keys with Ernest Hemingway; if he is talking about a Sazerac, then he and friends are at the St Charles; if . . . you get the picture. For me, as good as life gets - a good book AND a good drink. FYI: Vol i does the same thing for food. May be hard to find affordable, but scour old bookstores - you might get lucky.

There are others but without these they make no sense. More of them later.

I think if Ambrose Bierce or Dr. Samuel Johnson - authors of the two most accurate dictionaries in the English language - had lived long enough, they would have defined Websites as "that in which a person with much time and little knowledge uses the former to expose the latter." If you need a quick inventory of King Tut's tomb, or the Book of Leviticus in the original Hebrew, then the web is the place to go. But for anything else, the internet is that club Woody Allen spoke of when he said "I'm not sure I want to belong to any club that would have me as a member."

And before you snicker, I get the irony. Or more accurately, the idiocy of me offering this website. Believe me I don't do it for you - I am not about educating the planet, of leaving a meaningful contribution to mankind. I just want to lower the risk that if I ever end up at your house, or bar, that I will have to drink dreck and pretend it's just fine. That said, the internet can be useful for tracking down information on liquors.

What follows are NOT the best sites on the internet for things liquor. What this IS is a list of sites that I have found represent the range of product information and knowledge available generally on the internet. Ultimately you are simply going to trust a friend or a retailer you frequent. And then one day you will trust yourself. Until then:

Tequila.net
a very solid site that covers the manufacture ,the manufacturers, the types, ratings, places to drink

tequilasource.com/tequilabrands.htm
another great tequila source site - in particular go to the Brands page - there you will find 100s of links to specific distiller's websites

scotchwhisky.net
a comprehensive site on scotch - origins, distillers, how to drink it . . .

tastings.com/spirits/scotch.html
a decent site for tasting notes and ratings of scotches

straightbourbon.com
a solid site that has reams of info on bourbon brands, distillers, links to distiller websites, tasting notes - and the site looks cool (so I'm a sucker for graphics)

worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/en/List_of_liqueurs
a curious website - not quite sure whose it is but it does have a great breakdown and listing of 100s of liqueurs, origins, flavors, ingredients some history, links to manufacturers sites . . . . worth roaming in - liqueurs are little understood but offer an amazing flexibility to base hard liquors

in addition you will find quite a number of sites linked to the various brands listed on the various Liquor pages. Spend time roaming around in them - god knows what you'll find.