Slow Drinks

A quick foray outdoors is all the inspiration you need to make your next drink--alcoholic or not.

Weeding the garden might yield the makings for Dandelion Mead, while an early spring walk reveals the green shoots perfect for brewing Spruce Beer. Danny Childs brings his training as an ethnobotanist to the world of drinks, and with loving regard for even the humblest ingredients, explores each season’s offerings to make sodas, syrups, wines, beers, and amari.

Organized by season, Slow Drinks teaches home cooks, industry pros, homebrewers, and foragers how to transform botanical ingredients--whether gleaned, grown in the garden, or purchased from the store--into singular beverages and cocktails. With transporting photography and gorgeous color illustrations, Slow Drinks is the definitive guide to backyard mixology that can live just as comfortably in your basket on a foraging trip, as it can on the coffee table as a conversation piece.

Equipped with all the basic information needed to ferment, infuse, and pickle, and the reminder to attune your eyes to the bounty of the fields, gardens, and neighborhoods around you, Slow Drinks is your guide to making drinks that tell a story of time and place.

Danny Childs trained as an anthropologist and ethnobotanist studying the traditional medicinal uses of plants in the Amazon rainforest. Back home in Southern New Jersey, he now runs the standard-setting beverage program at the Farm and the Fisherman, a locavore restaurant in the Philadelphia suburb of Cherry Hill.