Keeping Track of Cocktail Recipes

[Scotttos]

With so many cocktail books and websites and forum chatter and scribbled notes from bars and bartenders it's damn hard remembering all the great drink recipes out there.

Is it just a matter of repetition and memorization? Do you keep index cards, flash cards, a drink index? As the drinks pile up I'm having and increasingly more difficult time cataloging everything. How do you do it?

[Chris Amirault]

I confess that I can't remember recipes very well, so anything that I don't do by feel or that isn't basic requires ratios. At first, I just wrote stuff in the front of my books, but I ran out of room pretty quickly. Next was keeping a list of hard-to-remember favorites in a gmail document. That allows me to search on text for an ingredient on my computer, and I print it out double-sided on one piece of cardstock to keep in my cabinet. The list it at about 100 right now, which still feels pretty manageable.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention cocktaildb.com, which I use for quick references and as a starting point for searching my books for new ideas.

[eje]

If I have to memorize a bunch for a party or something I'll write them on index cards, use them as flash cards and reference during the event. Then afterwards they go in the recipe bin.

The cool kids all seem to be using moleskine pocket address books for portable reference. Handy to carry around and indexed for quick reference.

There's some discussion of electronic formats for cocktail recipe storage in this topic:

cocktail recipe databases?, keeping track of recipes and notes

[TVC]

I keep a sturdy tablet that every six months or so I recopy into a new tablet with updated adjustments and notes. Time consuming, but it's good to have everything together in a portable, handy reference of your own fashion. I keep the recipes categorized by spirits.

In the end, it's just practice and after a while you remember many of them as variations of their respective categories. A daiquiri is just a rum sour and a tom collins is a sort of gin sour with soda, etc. Joy of Mixology has a handy chart that breaks down cocktails into families.

[TMFIII]

I keep a leather-bound diary-type book. I can put one or two recipes per side of the page and keep it on the bar. It looks nice and I like being able to thumb through it for cocktails that I've made in the past that I like. I think that's one of the tricks - I only put drinks that I've made and really enjoy in that book. If I'm looking for something new, I can look through the library of other books I have.

Just my .25oz of absinthe . . .

Cheers,

Marshall

[daisy17]

A daiquiri is just a rum sour and a tom collins is a sort of gin sour with soda, etc. Joy of Mixology has a handy chart that breaks down cocktails into families.

←

Joy of Mixology is the only cocktail book I've seen that actually helps you understand the relationship of cocktails to each other, which for me was the only way to remember ingredients and different cocktails. The book was very illuminating for me, a cocktail neophyte who would dorkily play my own weird "this is a ___ but with/without ___" game every time I had a new cocktail. I tried to make my own chart once or twice just to get a handle on things, but Gary really made that unnecessary.

[KatieLoeb]

I keep an index card file in the drawer under the register. As new cocktails make the list they are typed up and glued onto the index cards which are alphabetized. That way the other bartenders can make the drinks the same way when I'm not around.

Some of the other ones are just in my head. But the "substitution game" way of remembering things is handy for some things.

[Snowy is dead]

A separate notebook with recipes and annotations. Also, a printed cheat sheet taped on the side of the bar computer, so no one notices you when you're looking something up...