Whiskey was Tiffanie Barriere’s gateway into making drinks. “My grandma was a Scotch drinker, my grandfather was a Jack Daniel’s drinker, my mom’s a Crown Royal drinker,” says the Atlanta mixologist. “Brown liquor was always the choice in the house.” Barriere went on to lead the bar program at the pioneering One Flew South at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, which Tales of the Cocktail named the best airport bar in the world. Since leaving in 2016, she’s gone on to become a renowned educator nicknamed the Drinking Coach, leading cocktail seminars, judging international spirit competitions, and developing beverage programs. And now she’s just released her first book, Good Spirits: The Joy of Cocktails and the Stories Behind Them.
The book includes 125 recipes covering both classics and her own creations across a range of spirits and flavor profiles. On the side, Barriere also serves up nuggets of Black history. “During the pandemic, I started archiving beautiful stories of Black and brown folks,” she says, “and every time I’d research someone’s story, I’d make a drink, thinking about how the ingredients related to it.” The fruits of those connections abound in Good Spirits, including cocktails like the Cab Calloway, a rye-based ode to the jazz legend, or the Centennial, a cognac-centered drink with a pecan twist that’s named for a variety cultivated by an enslaved horticulturalist named Antoine (his pioneering work with pecans paved the way for their commercial production).
Bourbon, of course, makes plenty of appearances too, including in the Aperture, a whiskey-and-coffee nod to the photojournalist and filmmaker Gordon Parks, who made history as the first African American staff photographer for Life. “I was thinking about focus and intentionality with this drink,” Barriere says. “All the ingredients stand tall and are hyper strong, and they come together like a great photograph. Bourbon and coffee have also been around so long and have that weight of history to them, so it felt right to swing them together.”
Below, find the recipe for the brawny drink, dressed with a little chicory bitters and the vanilla-accented Licor 43. Feel free to experiment with different whiskeys in this cocktail—Barriere favors Penelope’s wheated bourbon or Woodford rye. “Espresso martini lovers,” she says, “here we go.”