Welcome to my cocktail database - a hobby project to track cocktails and ingredients.

Why I Built This

Most cocktail databases treat ingredients as flat lists—but that misses how cocktails actually work. A Margarita and a Daiquiri are structurally similar (spirit + citrus + sweetener), even though they use different specific ingredients. I wanted a database that captures these relationships.

A core component of this project is a hierarchical ingredient schema. Ingredients are organized into a tree structure: "Four Roses Bourbon" is a child of "Bourbon" which in turn is a child of "Whiskey". This hierarchy enables analytics and search capabilities that a flat database can't match.

Analytics & Data Science

The hierarchical structure unlocks interesting data analysis. Check out the Analytics page to explore:

• Ingredient usage patterns - See which ingredient categories appear most frequently, with drill-down into specific items
• Ingredient hierarchy tree - Interactive visualization of the ingredient taxonomy with recipe counts
• Recipe complexity analysis - Understand the distribution of cocktail complexity across the database
• Cocktail similarity mapping - Using UMAP embeddings based on ingredient overlap, visualize "cocktail space" and see which drinks are structurally similar
• EM-learned embeddings - By rolling up ingredients to their parent categories and using expectation-maximization to learn ingredient distances, we get even richer similarity metrics that reveal the underlying structure of cocktail families

What You Can Do

Sign up for a free account to:

• Rate and review cocktail recipes
• Add personal tags to organize your favorites
• Track your ingredient inventory
• Search for cocktails you can make with ingredients on hand

Signing up for an account requires an email address. This is solely to allow you to reset your password if you forget it and because the AWS Cognito authorization flow expects an email address. I do not use your email for any other purpose and will not share it with anyone or send any emails other than the ones you receive from Cognito.

Contributing Recipes & Ingredients

To maintain data quality for the analytics features described above, only editors can add new recipes and ingredients. If you'd like to become an editor or have recipes to contribute, please contact me at kurt.thorn@gmail.com.

Support & Issues

Found a bug or have a suggestion? Please open an issue on GitHub. As this is a hobby project, I may not be able to fix them immediately, but I appreciate your feedback.

Open Source & Open Data

This is both an open source and open data project. The code is available on GitHub, and the full database of recipes and ingredients is freely available for download. Feel free to fork it, use the data for your own projects, or contribute improvements.

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It was largely vibe coded with Claude, so the code may be a bit messy. The database is PostgreSQL, and the API runs via FastAPI on AWS EC2. It's quite cheap to run.

Cheers and enjoy exploring!