The lovingly-prepared cocktail is enjoying a renaissance across the country, from Portland, Ore., to New York--and the trend toward artisanal, old-school libations is just as strong in books. Every year there are more cocktail books published, highlighting specific spirits like whiskey and gin, as well as more general guides, like the perennial bestseller The Bartender’s Bible by Gary Regan. This fall, there’s a burgeoning subcategory shaking things up, so to speak: books by--and about--a new generation of star bartenders.

If chefs can become celebrities, why not bartenders? The undisputed master of the genre is Dale DeGroff, an expert mixologist who tended bar at the Rainbow Room in New York in the 1980s and founded the Museum of the American Cocktail. DeGroff wrote The Craft of the Cocktail (Clarkson Potter, 2002), and The Essential Cocktail (Potter, 2008). It doesn’t look like DeGroff, 61, will be dethroned anytime soon--but a younger crop of booze masters are helping to return bartending to what DeGroff calls “a craft profession”--and writing books on the subject.

Speakeasy: Classic Cocktails Reimagined, From New York’s Employees Only Bar comes out in October from Ten Speed Press. Its authors are DeGroff protege Dushan Zaric (pictured, above left), 40, and his partner at Employees Only, Jason Kosmas, 36. Zaric and Kosmas first became a team at a bar in Manhattan’s Soho called Pravda, where they cashed in on the 1990s martini craze. They co-authored 2006’s You Didn’t Hear It From Us: Two Bartenders Serve Women the Truth About Men, Making an Impression, and Getting What You Want (Atria), and now they turn toward their true area of expertise: Spritzes, Collinses, Fizzes, and other refreshments. They’re young, hip, and, as Dave Wondrich--a fixture in the American bartending scene who wrote the afterword to Speakeasy--says, “figures of no small importance in the modern cocktail revolution.” In his afterword, Wondrich praises Zaric and Kosmas for bringing the hospitable spirit of old-school bartending “to a new generation.”

While Speakeasy features recipes for cocktails from two of-the-moment “celebrity mixologists,” another book, Left Coast Libations by Ted Munat and Michael Lazar, widens the lens to include 50 (mostly) up-and-coming bartenders from Los Angeles to Vancouver. The authors are

self-publishing the book in September. Lazar attended the just-concluded New Orleans booze-fest Tales of the Cocktail, and said early copies of the book were on sale at the conference--and, he noted with modesty, were reportedly outselling tomes by DeGroff, Wondrich, and other members of the old guard. Left Coast Libations profiles a few established bartenders who Lazar calls “anchor figures”--but the majority of its personalities are bartenders who “are now starting to rise up from behind the bar,” like Eric Alperin (pictured, left) of The Varnish in Los Angeles and Jamie Boudreau of Knee High Stocking Company in Seattle.

There are other cocktail books by and about young bartenders coming this fall, too, including Boozehound: On the Trail of the Rare, the Obscure, and the Overrated in Spirits by Jason Wilson, 39 (Ten Speed, Sept.). There is also A Taste for Absinthe: 65 Recipes for Classic and Contemporary Cocktails by R. Winston Guthrie and James F. Thompson (Clarkson Potter, September)--which includes recipes from hot bartenders like Brian Miller of New York’s Death & Co, as well as a foreword by none other than DeGroff. Sure, up-and-comers are exciting. But in bartending, for now, at least, the kings still rule.

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