Chris Collins

Tools · cooking

Home bar

Tick the bottles and ingredients you have and see which of 200-odd classic, tiki, low-ABV and alcohol-free drinks you can make now and which are one or two away; rank the next bottle by how many drinks it unlocks; scale or party-batch any drink with dilution water, with its strength in standard drinks; syrup recipes, favourites and notes.

Added

Works with

How to use it

How to use it

Your bar — tick what you have, group by group (base spirits, liqueurs, vermouths and aperitivi, bitters, syrups, juices and fresh, mixers, dairy and egg, garnishes, pantry), or start from a quick-start bar: nearly empty, a classic starter bar or a tiki bar. Each item says how many drinks use it. Two switches change how a recipe is matched:

  • Strict matching off (the default): a recipe that names one member of a family accepts another, flagged as a swap — Plymouth or Old Tom gin for London dry, rye for bourbon, Aperol for Campari, Cocchi Americano for Lillet, ginger ale for ginger beer. Recipes that take either (“rye or bourbon”, “any gin”) are met by either without a flag. Strict matching turns the swaps off. Lemon and lime are never swapped.

  • Syrups from the pantry on: sugar counts as simple and rich syrup, honey as honey syrup, pomegranate juice and sugar as grenadine, almonds and sugar as orgeat, and so on — the Syrups & prep tab has the recipes.

Drinks — what you can make now, what is one ingredient away (with the missing one shown) and what is two away. Filter by base spirit, style, strength and flavour, or search for a drink or an ingredient. Open a name for its card; ☆ marks a favourite.

Next bottle — every bottle or ingredient you don’t have, ranked by how many more drinks it would let you make, with favourites counting extra (you set how much). Shopping plan picks the best buy, adds it, and picks again, showing the running total. It is a greedy plan: usually good, not guaranteed to be the best set.

Drink card — the spec in millilitres and ounces, step-by-step method, glass, ice and garnish, scaled to any number of servings. Batch for a party makes a bottled batch: top-ups, egg and dairy, muddled fruit and garnishes stay out of the bottle and are listed per glass, and if the batch is poured straight from the fridge or freezer the dilution water goes in too. The card estimates the drink’s strength as served — ABV, grams of alcohol, and standard drinks by your country’s definition. Made it keeps dated notes and a rating.

Syrups & prep — simple and rich syrup, demerara, honey and honey-ginger, agave, grenadine, orgeat, oleo saccharum, a falernum-style syrup, cinnamon, ginger, raspberry and passion fruit syrups and saline, scaled to the amount you want.

Favourites & notes — your favourites and every note, with JSON export and import. The bar, favourites and notes stay in this browser; the bar (not the favourites or notes) can go in a link.

This is a hobby page about making a good drink. Know what is in your glass, have water and food with it, and never drive after drinking — there are 17 alcohol-free drinks here too.

The numbers

  • Specs are written in ml with 30 ml taken as 1 oz, the usual bar rounding (a US fluid ounce is 29.6 ml); ounces are shown to the nearest quarter, marked ≈ when that is more than 1 ml out. Batch volumes are in true US fluid ounces. A dash is taken as 0.8 ml, a barspoon as 5 ml.

  • Dilution — the water the ice adds, as a share of the drink before dilution: shaken 30 %, stirred 25 %, thrown 20 %, built over ice 15 %, blended 50 %; none for drinks built without ice or served hot. These are rules of thumb, editable on the card: hard shaking adds more, a big cube melts less. For shaken and stirred drinks they apply before any top-up.

  • Strength: alcohol = Σ volume × the bottle’s ABV, using typical bottlings (labels vary); ethanol weighs 0.789 g/ml. Optional extras are left out.

  • Standard drinks: UK 8 g (one unit, 10 ml; NHS), US 14 g (NIAAA), Canada 13.45 g (Canada’s Guidance on Alcohol and Health, CCSA 2023), Australia 10 g (Department of Health), New Zealand 10 g (Ministry of Health), Ireland 10 g (HSE), and the WHO’s 10 g reference — or your own.

  • Simple and rich syrup amounts assume dissolved sugar adds about 0.62 ml per gram; rich (2 : 1) syrup is then about 1.4 times as sweet per millilitre as simple (1 : 1).

Limits

  • The drinks are this page’s own writing of well-known specs — the classics, modern classics, tiki, highballs, sparkling and low-ABV drinks, and alcohol-free ones. Specs vary from bar to bar and book to book; treat them as a starting point and adjust to taste.

  • Strengths are estimates from typical bottle strengths and rule-of-thumb dilution: they are not a measure of what you have drunk, and not a guide to whether you can drive.

  • Batches with fresh citrus are best made on the day. Syrup keeping times are rules of thumb: keep them cold and throw out anything cloudy, fizzy or mouldy.

  • Raw egg carries a small risk of salmonella; use fresh eggs (or pasteurised whites or aquafaba) and skip egg drinks for anyone pregnant, very young, elderly or unwell.

  • The ranking counts only the drinks on this page.

Linking to an example

The bar, the matching switches and the drink card travel in a link; these can be written by hand:

Parameter Meaning Example

bar

Comma-separated ingredient ids (as in the backup JSON)

bar=london-dry-gin,campari,sweet-vermouth

strict

Strict matching, true or false

strict=true

pantry

Count syrups made from the pantry, true or false

pantry=false

drink

The drink on the card (its id)

drink=last-word

serv

Servings

serv=8

batch

Batch for a party, true or false

batch=true

example

One of the presets below

example=tiki

Add the tab after #: bar, drinks, next, card, prep or favs.

example= Shows

basics

A nearly empty bar — citrus, sugar, soda, the cupboard (open)

starter

A classic starter bar (open)

tiki

A tiki bar (open)

everything

Every bottle on the list (open)

negroni

The Negroni card (open)

party-negroni

Twelve Negronis bottled with dilution water (open)

party-margarita

Ten margaritas batched (open)

Runs entirely in your browser; nothing you type leaves this page.