It’s a good idea to be skeptical of anyone who eulogizes the “good old days of book publishing.” As anyone who has worked as a publishing assistant can tell you, the whole concept of the “three-Martini lunch” is predicated on there being some underpaid underling back at the office, willing to finish the drinkers’ work for them.

But every so often, a book comes along that embodies the promise of what “old-school book publishing” was supposed to be: A visionary author has an original idea, albeit one with uncertain market upside. A fiery, uncompromising editor advocates for her author and his concept, sales projections be damned! A publishing house, motivated by reverence, trust and perhaps a bit of fear of the editor, commits to printing 25,000 copies of this 400-plus-page book (paper is expensive!) and maintaining the purity of the author’s vision. The book finds its audience, sales soar and the genre is forever changed.

When Maria Guarnaschelli invited Dave Arnold to lunch to discuss a potential book project, Arnold knew enough about the W. W. Norton editor’s reputation to be slightly nervous. Guarnaschelli, who passed away in 2021, “had a huge, outsized character,” Arnold recalls. “I don’t know how she’d heard of me—maybe through Alex.” (Guarnaschelli’s daughter is the chef, author and TV personality Alex Guarnaschelli.)

Soon after the lunch, Arnold, who was an instructor at the Culinary Institute of America at the time and ran its technology-focused blog, Cooking Issues, had a two-book deal with Guarnaschelli. “She signed me before I even had a pitch.” Notably, this was also before his genre-defining New York bar, Booker and Dax—the place where he put into practice many of the techniques and ideas he’d later come to be known for—opened in Manhattan. Years later, in November 2014, Norton published Liquid Intelligence.

Despite some early disagreements about the direction the book should take (per Arnold, Guarnaschelli originally wanted him to write a sous-vide cookbook, because “cocktail books don’t sell”), by the end of the process, and with Guarnaschelli’s blessing, Arnold had written a precise, highly technical book that spoke to a specialized, dedicated audience of drink-makers. 

“Top down, the publishing mantra is, Make it simple so everyone can use it. Maria, to her immense credit, told me, ‘No. Write the real book, the book you want,’” recalls Arnold.

“Dave can’t take the rigor out of any of his processes, which is such a lovely quality,” says Mitchell Kohles, who worked as Guarnachelli’s editorial assistant at the time and was instrumental in the book’s production. “Maria was in love with him. She was very proud of identifying people with a unique talent and elevating them.” 

Less than a year later, when I was an editor at Ten Speed Press, I used the commercial success of Liquid Intelligence to advance my case that the forthcoming Smuggler’s Cove book should be 356 pages and $30, and have a dark, brooding cover—as opposed to the cheap and cheerful, Tommy Bahama–friendly paperback many expected. The popularity of Arnold’s book, I argued, proved that there was a niche audience of cocktail weirdos who could be counted on to buy a cocktail book done well—and differently.

This fall marks the 10th anniversary of Liquid Intelligence, and a second edition is already underway. “It was due a while ago,” Arnold admits, “but because everything takes me forever, it’s late. It was supposed to be released on the 10th anniversary, but I’m going to hand in [the manuscript] on the 10th anniversary and pretend that still counts.” 

In the intervening years, Norton has sold Italian, Japanese, Vietnamese, Portuguese and Chinese (both simplified and traditional) language rights; the book has been reprinted 13 times; and per Norton, it has sold more than 170,000 copies—a remarkable achievement for a high–price point, high–barrier to entry book on cocktails. Melanie Tortoroli, Arnold’s current editor at Norton, says sales have been notably consistent week to week over the last decade: “This book has had legs.”

When Liquid Intelligence came out in 2014, craft cocktail culture was still cultish and mystical. In the United States, speakeasy culture was thriving: Bars had hidden entryways, passcodes and word-of-mouth menus. Vintage, pre–Prohibition Era cocktail manuals, brimming with the wisdom of the ancients and sniped from eBay, were revered: the mixological Ark of the Covenant. 

But many bartenders were looking for a different, less woo-woo way of understanding flavor and creating a new pantheon of classics. “In the U.S., history is working like an anchor,” says Monica Berg, an Oslo native who opened bars there before moving to London and founding Tayēr + Elementary with Alex Kratena.

In Europe, by contrast, the tether to a pre-Prohibition ideal of what cocktails were supposed to be—an ideal promulgated by U.S. bartenders like Sasha Petraske, Audrey Saunders and Julie Reiner—was weaker. Physical proximity to the perfume industry in Grasse, France (where rotary evaporators were an essential tool for extracting and amplifying aromatic compounds), and the kitchens of innovators like Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal (kingpins of the molecular gastronomy movement), not to mention more relaxed regulations surrounding the use of distillation equipment, meant that European bartenders were primed to embrace the use of new technology.

“A lot of these techniques and a lot of the technology already existed in the food world,” notes Devon Tarby, a founding partner at the hospitality group Gin & Luck (the group behind Death & Co., among other bars) and co-author of Cocktail Codex. “But how do we apply them to the medium of liquid?” 

Arnold’s book not only had answers to bartenders’ beverage-specific questions, it also had measurements—lots and lots of measurements—to back those answers up. All of that rigorously researched raw data might have been considered a liability by certain commercial publishers. But to readers like Tarby and Berg, it was a rallying cry for an industry too often overshadowed by its culinary counterpart. “Everybody agrees that baking is chemistry,” says Berg. “There’s a class at Harvard about the science of cooking. But nobody, even people who know better, applies this logic to cocktails. [Liquid Intelligence] gave a lot of credibility to our work.” 

James Preciado Sutter studied chemistry and the philosophy of science before becoming a bartender. Today, he is the beverage director of Baldwin Bar and Birds of Paradise in Massachusetts. “The lasting impact [of Liquid Intelligence] is that it provided a structured, scientifically oriented way of understanding the lore of what makes a drink a good drink—the very notion that this sort of thing is breakdownable and understandable,” Sutter says. Berg agrees: “It allowed us to stop guessing, to base cocktails on more than just romantic stories from the past.” 

Many of the bartenders I spoke with described Liquid Intelligence as a “textbook”—a fitting characterization for a data-driven book authored by a career educator, released by one of the most revered U.S. publishers of academic texts (specifically, the Norton Anthologies and Norton Critical Editions). 

And like all great textbooks, Liquid Intelligence inspired its students to iterate and experiment. “When you’re spending all your time trying to figure out how the science or technology works, then you don’t get to spend as much time being creative,” Tarby explains. For her, having raw data on acid levels of various citrus fruits, sugar levels of commercially available products and the ABV of classic cocktails allowed her to devote more time to innovating. 

Another parallel with academic textbooks: After many years, Liquid Intelligence would benefit from a revised edition. Even Arnold admits that some of his data, which was based on the best available information at the time, needs updating. Sutter told me, “I’ve revised almost all of the things that he wrote down and suggested you do,” based on his own experiments and calculations. For Tito Pin-Perez, a New York City native who moved to Mexico City to open Rayo, Liquid Intelligence was foundational when he started his journey. But he realized upon moving to Mexico that “the measurements were wrong because all of the ingredients that we have here are different.” The citric acid he bought in Mexico to adjust cocktails behaved differently than the citric acid he bought in the U.S. His team had to readjust. 

None of this diminishes the value of Arnold’s work in the eyes of these bartenders, though. “It doesn’t matter,” Sutter assures me, “because the lasting impact [of Liquid Intelligence] is the structure of how you think about cocktails.”

Thanks to Liquid Intelligence, in places where Tarby and her partners designed the program but couldn’t be physically present for every shift, she could teach her team to acid-adjust and remain confident that citrus and sweetness levels were correct. “Anyone can place an Amazon order for acid powders. It allowed us to do cooler things more sustainably in a higher-volume environment.”

Acid-adjusting is just one of Arnold’s techniques to reach the mainstream. “Carbonated cocktails would not be where they are today if it weren’t for Arnold talking about forced carbonation and crown-cap bottles,” says Sutter. “Using enzymes for clarification wouldn’t have spread beyond the wine community. The popularity of centrifuges as something that is not only reasonable for a bar to do... but something you can do?” Arnold can be thanked for that one, too.

Berg sums it up: “I think a lot of people will never understand how much this book has done for bartending, and specifically technique-driven bartending. They will just go on, blissfully unaware of how much easier their life is. But a lot of people are very grateful.”