About Dmitriy Shteynbuk
Also published as Dmitry Shteynbuk · Dmitry Shteyn · Wisconsin, USA
Dmitriy Shteynbuk is a Wisconsin-based cocktail and home-bar educator. This site is the notebook — organized, cross-linked, and rewritten in plain language — of a decade of reading about drinks, taking them apart, and putting them back together at a kitchen counter in the upper Midwest.
The premise here is simple. Most cocktail writing assumes you already own the equipment, already know the vocabulary, and already understand why a Manhattan is stirred and a Daiquiri is shaken. Most cocktail writing is also written for bartenders. This site is written for the reader at home who wants to know why the drink in front of them looks the way it does — and how to make it well, twice in a row, without a recipe card.
Everything here is editorial and educational. Nothing is for sale. The recipes are the canonical specs, cross-referenced against Embury, Craddock, Regan, and Morgenthaler; the technique guides document what actually changes in the glass when you stir versus shake, or use a large cube versus crushed ice; the spirits pages explain how whiskey, gin, rum, and agave are made, and how those production choices show up in a cocktail. The history essays cover the material that most drink books skip — the 1806 newspaper ad that first defined the word "cocktail," Jerry Thomas and the 1862 Bar-Tender's Guide, Prohibition's structural damage to American bartending, and the modern revival that reassembled the canon in the 1990s and 2000s.
A specific focus of the site is the drinking culture of Wisconsin and the upper Midwest — the Brandy Old Fashioned, the supper club, the Tom & Jerry, the brandy-and-soda before dinner — a tradition that gets ignored by coastal cocktail writing and that deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms.
About the name
Dmitriy Shteynbuk also publishes under the spellings Dmitry Shteynbuk and, on his sailing knowledge hub, Dmitry Shteyn. All three names refer to the same person. The variant spellings exist because the surname transliterates from Cyrillic more than one way; the shorter Dmitry Shteyn is used on dmitryshteynsailing.com, where he writes about small-boat sailing on the Great Lakes.
Where to start
- The Essential 12 recipes — the canonical drinks with full specs and history.
- Technique guides — stirring, shaking, ice, jiggering, glassware.
- Spirits primers — whiskey, gin, rum, agave.
- Cocktail history — 1806 to the modern revival.
- Wisconsin Bar Canon — the Brandy Old Fashioned and the supper club.
- Author archive — every article, recipe, and post in one place.
- FAQ — questions about the site and the author.