Meet the Author – Slow Drinks: A Field Guide to Foraging and Fermenting Seasonal Sodas, Botanical Cocktails, Homemade Wines, and More

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.

Discounted books will be available for purchase at Binding Agents, to be signed and personalized by Danny.

Prices are inclusive of fees, a cocktail, and bar snacks.   Entrance to the shop requires on step up.  Please contact jennifer@slowfoodphilly.org with any questions or accessibility needs; we’d be happy to help.

About the Author: Danny Childs is the author of the James Beard Award-winning book Slow Drinks and the founder of the company by the same name. Danny is a trained ethnobotanist whose botanical approach to creating beverages embodies local flavors by utilizing ingredients foraged from the wild, picked from his cocktail garden, and sourced from local farms.  Danny teaches others how to create drinks in this manner through his consulting business, educational courses, and with his role in the Slow Food organization.  Follow along @slowdrinks.

About Binding Agents: Nestled in Philadelphia’s culinary epicenter, the 9th Street Italian Market, Binding Agents is an independent, women-owned book store for anyone who loves food. Founded in 2024, the shop specializes in cookbooks, offering an extensive collection of contemporary and classic titles for experienced chefs, aspiring home cooks, eager eaters who hate turning on the oven, and everyone in between. They also carry a carefully curated selection of food-focused reads, including delicious memoirs, craveable fiction, savory (and unsavory) history and scrumptious books for kids.