Product Description

Miss Charming's Guide for Hip Bartenders and Wayout Wannabes is a new approach to the top-selling bartending category, providing readers with all of the insider tips they need to become a top-shelf bartender-at home or as a career.

Packed full of fun hints, tricks, tips and recipes, Miss Charming's Guide for Hip Bartenders and Wayout Wannabes is a one-stop reference for readers looking for a fun-filled, practical guide on how to tend bar full time, part time or party time!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #449631 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From the Back Cover
All I can say is wow!

When people ask me about how to become a Magic Bartender, this is the first book I recommend. It covers all the aspects you need to know from a bartending standpoint. Fabulous.
-Doc Eason: longtime legendary Magic Bartender at John Denver’s World Famous Tower Comedy Magic Bar in Snowmass, Colorado

If all other bartending books are a shortpour of cheap Amaretto, this one is a Double Top-Shelf Flaming Doctor Pepper. No self-respecting bartender or mixologist should be without it.
-Toby Ellis: nightlife and drinks consultant via www.barmagic.com, and cofounder and former President of the Flair Bartenders Association

A refreshing take on the subject. Simply Delightful.
-Gary Regan: cocktails and spirits expert; author of The Joy of Mixology: The Consummate Guide to the Bartender’s Craft

If I took all of the bar books in my collection (and there are many!) and poured all of their good parts into a shaker tin, shook them up and fine strained this cocktail into a giant martini glass, out would pour this bar book. Anyone else that is thinking of writing a complete book about bartending and the cocktail culture should put their pens down now.
Because it’s been done.
-Dean Serneels: prolific and innovative bar product inventor, worldwide bartending speaker and President and founder of Flairco.com

The name Miss Charming evokes the picture
of a southern belle with a big hoop skirt and a cute curtsy. Wrong! Watch out fellas, women may not rule the world yet, but Cheryl Charming is making serious inroads in the bar world. Get this book.
-Dale DeGroff: author of the Craft of the Cocktail, founding President of The Museum of the American Cocktail and America’s foremost authority on mixology

Customer Reviews

Awesome Book
So I am both a bartender and an voracious reader/collector of books on my chosen profession and I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Written in an enagaging style it would benefit and educate both the newbie bartender as well as the 'old hand'.
Aimed towards the professional rather than the amateur it has the challenge of 'teaching' perhaps the biggest groups of know-it-alls on the planet and it succeeds admirably. That is not to say that the keen home 'shaker-upper' of drinks should not have it at home too as it provides both useful tips for them in their endeavours and insights into the murky world of the 'Pro'.
A great read, a useful tool and (groan) a fantastic cocktail of stories, facts and ideas at the sharp end of our industry. Bravo.

Best book on bartending
Cheryl's book is a fantastic tool not only for the neophytes, but also for those who have been bartending for years, rich of informations and useful suggestions very hard to find on any other books. Definitely the best book on bartending I have ever read. Higly recommended .
Dom Costa

A simple cocktail book...and the complexity of publishing it.
This review is, unfortunately, one of those good news/bad news affairs. The good news: This is a book well worth owning. It contains excellent guidance, stories (parables, really) both entertaining and subtly moving bartenders and home mixologists alike toward a greater grasp of the "beingness" of bartending - from an author who speaks eloquent Bartenderese.

Cheryl Charming, beginning with her name, continuing with the cartoony light touch of her previous fare, and concluding with publishing deals that emphasized those characteristics, has rarely been taken seriously among the cocktail elite. Her advice to bartenders less seasoned than she is puts the lie to that appraisal in this book. Ask any attendee of the [...] forums if you doubt it. Cheryl Charming is wise. Nonetheless, that was the legacy Ms Charming was tarred with previous to this book.

Here, the years of experience behind the mahogany are brought to bear. The book is packed with the aforementioned stories, charts, tables, and a plethora of useful aids to working bartenders and novices who want to grasp that distinctly social/functional headset. The up-to-date specific gravities of liqueurs (allowing the construction of numbers of perfect Pousse Cafés) and the unprecedented coverage of the largely ignored 1970s as relate to cocktails...these alone are worth the exceedingly affordable price of the book.

Cheryl sent me an early draft of "Miss Charming's Guide for Hip Bartenders and Wayout Wannabes" for fact checking. I raved. It was a superb look at bartending from the trenches. It cast a broad light on the vastly neglected (even by me) 1970s-80s era of cocktails. It voiced its offerings in a magically odd combination of honesty, humor, cynicism, and energy that only comes of living the life. I was immediately fatuous.

Much of this tone remains in the current work. It is still a tome well worth owning....no thanks to Cheryl Charming's editors and publishers. She was offered a hardback deal; a chance to visually transcend the past works that emphasized the playful frivolities of cocktails at the expense of their incredibly gourmet high end. In the final tally, (and for legal reasons here I must state it is an opinion...MY opinion) they screwed her. Crappy paper, soft-back, a vastly concatenated word count.....this was not, after all, the book that would show the world what an amazing point of view Ms Charming could offer. In short, they were nitwits, requiring massive text cuts, cutting singularly unique perspectives and marketing the book in exactly the same vein as any silly joke book. It is a shame. Note well....I only know this from the advantage I had in viewing an early draft and advising on factual elements. The book you are offered, as I indicated above, is entirely worth its price and worthy of any cocktail library.

If publishing companies were not such dolts, though, it would've been a better book for which you would've (appropriately) paid substantially more money. Buy the book, it remains worth it, but be contemptuous of the publishing company for their lack of vision.