“Spirited Women” Is the Best Drinks Book of the Year

In Spirited Women: Makers, Shakers, and Trailblazers in the World of Cocktails, the writer-illustrator duo of Sammi Katz and Olivia McGiff celebrate women in the drinks industry, from mixologists to brand owners to distillers (and plenty more). If you’re like, “Yeah, there’s plenty of women in the industry today, so what,” well, this is recent history. As Katz and McGiff point out in the introduction of Spirited Women, it was less than 80 years ago that the Supreme Court upheld a Michigan law prohibiting women from tending bar unless their father or husband owned the establishment. That law was overturned in 1976, only two years after women were allowed to open their own bar tabs without a man’s approval (credit the Equal Credit Opportunity Act). 

So it’s kind of a new(ish) phenomenon to find women in places of power and importance in the drinks world. “The drinks industry has been vastly improved by featuring and championing the women in it who are doing incredible things,” Katz tells us. “Hopefully, we’ll reach a point where we don’t have to put the qualifier of ‘woman’ or ‘female’ before a job description, but the history of women being banned from drinking in or working in bars is too recent to ignore, and the biases are still there. I don’t know a woman in this industry who hasn’t at some point been asked if she’s ‘sure’ she can lift that keg.”

And, as Katz notes, many of the women profiled in Spirited Women entered the drinks field when it was almost entirely male-staffed. So let’s celebrate these booze makers (distillers and blenders such as Nicole Austin, Stephanie Macleod and Victoria Eady Butler), shakers (bar pros like Lynnette Marrero, Shannon Mustipher and LP O’Brien) and trailblazers, a category that includes everyone from brand owners (Aubrey Slater, Yola Jimenez) to cocktail historians (Mallory O’Meara) to the leadership team at the industry’s biggest event, Tales of the Cocktail. 

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Spirited Women is also a great cocktail book, with 45 recipes that are tied into each person’s profile and accompanied by wonderful illustrations. “The illustrations really bring the cocktails and people to life in a way that, ironically, photos can’t,” Katz says. “They make the drinks feel much more tactile, and I think Olivia is able to capture the essence of these women without requiring anyone to show up for a photoshoot. There’s also just something really special about having your portrait painted.”

We’re particularly a fan of the Daiquiri recipe that’s paired with the profile of Appleton Estate’s Dr. Joy Spence, the first female master blender in any spirits category. The recipe and book excerpt, below. 

Joie de Vivre

Recipe reprinted with permission from Spirited Women by Sammi Katz and Olivia McGiff. Published by Union Square & Co. Illustrations by Olivia McGiff.

Joy truly lives up to her name. She is full of vitality and ardor, whether she’s blending rum or tending to her favorite pastime: gardening. She has many orchids and flowering plants in her garden and likes to enjoy a glass of rum among her fauna. “Sitting in my garden room with my orchids, watching the hummingbirds fly around my head, I would just simply have the eight-year-old neat,” she says. Joy is also a cocktail lady with a love of Daiquiris, so I used the Appleton Estate eight-year-old in a Daiquiri inspired by her flower garden. Hibiscus is commonly used in Caribbean cuisine and has a lovely floral quality that pairs excellently with guava (Joy actually has a few guava trees in her garden). Allspice dram, a liqueur made from Jamaican rum and allspice berries, adds just a touch of warming spice to balance the fruitiness. The garnish, of course, is an orchid. This is a cocktail that certainly celebrates the joy of rum.

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