Jim Meehan has been a bartender without a bar for some time—“a cowboy without a horse,” in his words. This has been the case, to varying degrees, since he moved to Portland from New York a decade ago. It was an attempt, he’s said, to lower his profile. He’d opened the bar PDT in 2007, released an acclaimed book of its drinks by 2011, and won the James Beard Award for outstanding bar program a year later. He remained a partner in PDT, whose name abbreviates “please don’t tell,” until 2019, and has opened and consulted on multiple bar projects in the meantime, including Takibi in Portland and his current gig developing menus for American Express’s Centurion lounges. He’s also written two more books, including his latest, The Bartender’s Pantry, which was coauthored by Emma Janzen and features illustrations by Bart Sasso and comes out June 11. But in all of his success outside of a bartender’s traditional surroundings, he’s still uneasy giving an interview at someone else’s bar.

“It’d be so much easier for me to tell you about me and my universe and my values if we were sitting in my own bar,” he said in May, sitting in a booth at Teardrop, the pioneering Portland cocktail bar in the Pearl District. “At PDT, you could sit in my space and listen to my music and meet my colleagues and drink my drinks and eat my hot dogs.” (Guests entered PDT through a phone booth inside of an adjoined hot dog shop.)

He asked the bartender for “something NA and delicious”—he’s not sober, but at 48, says he’s cut back on drinking—and suggested I order the Windowsill Spritz, a peach, almond, and prosecco cocktail, a play on a bellini. The menu advertised it as “unabashedly bouncy.” It was slightly opaque (white peaches, turns out) and served in a horn-shaped flute that was, at least in my memory, a foot tall, which I think made it more delicious.

There’s a recipe for the Windowsill Spritz in The Bartender’s Pantry, credited to former Teardrop bar manager Sean Hoard. It’s in the section devoted to “Fruits,” one of 10 chapters that together outline a somewhat modern wave of culinary ingredients making their way into cocktails. The book is a sampling of who’s doing this, how, and where, that can serve as an instruction manual. But it also contains an encyclopedic amount of information about the provenance, taxonomies, and cultural histories of ingredients, including chapters on dairy; grains and nuts; vegetables, flowers, and herbs; spices; and ferments. It will undoubtedly float you a few new ingredients (cubeb berries, an Indonesian spice) and recipes (Borodinsky rye kvass, the beverage fermented from bread; a recipe is supplied by Kachka chef Bonnie Morales), while also deepening your understanding of ingredients you thought you knew intimately. For example, it details 10 different kinds of sugar.

Meehan runs his cocktail consulting firm, Mixography, Inc., which counts an app and a leather goods company among its clients, out of his Portland home, where he lives with his wife and two kids, aged 6 and 11. Its ethos, Meehan says, is to promote “the idea that cocktails are a culture, and that this culture is something you could experience beyond just eating and drinking.”

It’s through this same lens that, in this new book, cocktails become a Trojan horse, an innocuous and fun beverage that opens conversations around how corn subsidies and the advent of high fructose corn syrup affect obesity and diabetes rates; how the commodity spice trade has made tracking the origin of commercial spices virtually impossible; and how the “get big or get out” slogan of 1970s agriculture promoting disease-prone crop monocultures for ease of commodification, well, manifested disease-prone crop monocultures. Under a magnifying glass, cocktails quickly become political.

But Meehan didn’t set out to write a politically informed cocktail manual. And you don’t have to read this as one, either. He decided to write it in 2017 while touring his second book, the James Beard Award–winning Meehan’s Bartender Manual. In a Philadelphia bar “sort of masquerading as a cocktail bar,” he spotted a pack of pasteurized, frozen lime juice: a cardinal sin, and in a place “masquerading” as something on the level of his own work and the work of his contemporaries, no less. He would write a new age text recording the culinary wave he was seeing in cocktail culture and bring the standards he’d cut his teeth upholding into the present, he thought. In writing, he learned he didn’t yet have the full story. “There’s a whole generation of bartenders who don’t necessarily view fresh-squeezed juice as best,” he said. Investigating why altered his sense of self: “The person that sat at that bar incredulous about that lime juice is not the same person that’s sitting here.”

His first book was directly inspired by the Savoy Cocktail Book, the compendium of bartender Harry Craddock’s canonical cocktails at the Savoy Hotel in London. The second book sought to update nineteenth-century cocktail manuals along the likes of Harry Johnson’s Bartenders’ Manual (1882). Both projects had templates, and they covered subjects Meehan was famously knowledgeable about. By contrast, after a brief introduction, the opening sentence of The Bartender’s Panty reads, “Unlike in Meehan’s Bartender Manual and The PDT Cocktail Book, I am the narrator rather than the subject of this story.”

His process was intensely journalistic this time around. He read a lot of books and interviewed industry experts, made his first batch of kombucha and learned the Latin roots of common grains. Years into the project, he sat down to assemble the book and “started spinning.” He wasn’t stumped. But just as he needed to consult a wide range of sources to compile the information, he needed help from journalist and editor Emma Janzen, the book’s coauthor, to hone his ecstatically ballooned research. The result reads, in the best way, like following an insatiably curious person’s notes as they dive deep into topics that thrill them and attempt to assemble a 360-degree understanding.

As I sip my Windowsill Spritz, Meehan tells me it was made with frozen peaches—IQF (individually quick frozen), a flash-freezing method that perpetuates their “phenological” peak. Another recipe in the book uses canned corn instead of fresh, on the advice of modernist chef Wylie Dufresne.

The book isn’t filled with five-minute recipes or cocktail “hacks.” But it is invested in finding the best approach to handling an ingredient, regardless of whether that approach subverts long-standing traditions. In doing so, it delivers a scrupulous defense of why it’s asking you to use specific methods and ingredients, which makes it feel approachable. In contrast to many recipe books, it’s hard to find yourself cursing its author and wondering why the hell you would infuse gin with butter for 48 hours (it’s to craft an exceptionally balanced martini, of course; the fat rounds the alcohol’s bite, and the lactic acid provides a gentle tartness).

Meehan’s previous books have catered to a professional audience. Somewhat by accident, this became his most domestic book to date. “I’m writing for someone who is curious,” he says, “who wants to be brought on a journey and is willing—if they’re completely new to this subject matter—to do a little work to catch up. Maybe a lot.”

In terms of his own journey, Meehan is unwavering about his plans to get back behind the bar, back on the horse—or spacecraft. “If I can continue to have my career in carbonite, Han Solo–style, and basically defrost myself when my kids get a little older and go back into service—I think that’s the plan.”