PDT Project & Savoy Stomp

It's difficult to love cocktail culture without veering into academic territory (read: geek town).

Like wine, cocktails can lead down a rabbit hole of history, politics and religion with dizzying speed.

There are professionals, such as David Wondrich, who have made a career of untangling these knots. But there is also a growing group of home enthusiasts who have steeped themselves in cocktail-recipe projects, all in the interest of discovering the nuances of drinking.

PDT Project: The collaborative food blog Umamimart has recently launched a new column dedicated to recreating every recipe from Jim Meehan's new cocktail tome. The blog just published its first recipe attempt, so there is still time to follow along.

Savoy Stomp: In 2007, San Francisco's Erik Ellestad embarked on a mission to recreate every cocktail that appears in The Savoy Cocktail Book, a classic compendium published in 1930. Now, five years later, he's nearly shaken or stirred all 888. His blog is an impressive index of recipes–both from the Savoy and of his own creation (like a re-invented Brandy Smash; click here to see the recipe). The blog also offers researched trial and error when it comes to obscure (or now-extinct) ingredients and their would-be substitutes.