Where to Start with Dave Arnold
Dave Arnold is a food scientist, inventor, educator, and cocktail innovator who has pushed the boundaries of what is possible behind a bar. He is the founder of the Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD) in New York and the former owner of Booker and Dax, the high-tech cocktail bar that operated within David Chang’s Momofuku Ssam Bar. Arnold hosts the long-running radio show and podcast Cooking Issues, where he answers questions about food science with an infectious enthusiasm for experimentation. His background is in engineering and technology rather than traditional hospitality, and he brings that perspective to everything he does. His book Liquid Intelligence (2014) won the James Beard Award for Best Beverage Book and became the definitive text on the science of cocktails, covering topics from ice crystal formation to enzyme clarification to the physics of carbonation. Arnold is known for inventing tools and techniques that have been adopted by bars worldwide, including methods for rapid infusion and clarified cocktails.
Start here
Liquid Intelligence
Dave Arnold · 416 pages · 2014 · Challenging
Themes: cocktail science, advanced techniques, food science, craft cocktails
A deep dive into the science behind cocktails, written from behind the bar at Booker and Dax, Arnold’s high-tech cocktail laboratory in New York. Winner of the 2015 James Beard Award for Best Beverage Book, this is the cocktail world’s equivalent of a food science textbook, written with personality and genuine passion.
Why Start Here
Arnold approaches cocktails the way a scientist approaches an experiment. He asks fundamental questions that most bartenders take for granted: Why does shaking make drinks colder than stirring? What is actually happening when you muddle mint? How does ice dilution affect flavor over time? Then he designs experiments to find the answers, and shares both the results and the reasoning in detail.
The book covers temperature and dilution, carbonation, sugar and acid balance, clarification techniques, infusions, and the physics of ice. Along the way, Arnold introduces more than 120 recipes that put the science into practice. The real value is the understanding you gain: once you know how temperature, dilution, and acid interact, you can troubleshoot any drink that is not working.
What to Expect
A 416-page book with nearly 450 color photographs. This is not a beginner’s first cocktail book. It is the book you graduate to after you have the basics down and want to understand the “why” behind everything. Arnold writes clearly and with humor, but the content is genuinely scientific. If you are the kind of person who wants to understand how things work at a fundamental level, this book will transform the way you think about drinks.