Project Calcuhol Overview
Succinctly, Project Calcuhol is an attempt at creating a software program that allows the user to input any set of cocktail ingredients and then outputs a recipe that precisely balances those flavors in the best possible cocktail that one can make with them.
There are many websites that give a collection of cocktail recipes; however, this project represents something more fundamental. It rests on the assumption that all great cocktail recipes are just manifestations of some underlying pattern, that there are deep principles governing the creation of outstanding libations in the same way that the laws of physics are behind all physical phenomena. Project Calcuhol seeks to uncover these bibulous laws of nature and deliver powerful cocktail prediction software for the discerning imbiber.
This site is organized into different sections. You can find a detailed attempt at laying down the mathematical foundations for the theory behind cocktails at Statement of the Theory. Ingredient Calibration proposes a systematic method for measuring the necessary properties of cocktail ingredients. A description of how the resulting cocktail prediction algorithm works can be found at The Algorithm.
These are all very technical, so feel free to skip to The Cocktail Calculator itself and start calculating yourself some recipes!
You can also read about some cocktails that I’ve calculated and tried myself at Drink Experiment Blog
Motivation
Suppose you have an idea for mixing several ingredients in a cocktail or perhaps you’re a bartender and a guest asks for such a thing that you have never mixed before. You cannot find any recipes for this specific concoction in books or the internet. Even a bartender with an intuitive feel for how different ingredients work would be hard-pressed to compose a great drink on the spot especially when there are many ingredients involved. Crafting the best possible drink from custom ingredients is a central challenge in cocktail making, which can take many expensive experiments before a worthy recipe emerges.
Alternatively, you may have found that a recipe works well with one brand of spirit, but with another it is too sweet, strong, etc… and you would like to know how to adjust the recipe.
Project Calcuhol attempts to solve these problems by mathematically modelling the structure of a great cocktail and building a database of information on different ingredients allowing one to predict the best recipe for any set of ingredients.
The Cocktail Calculator
Just a few notes on this program:
- Currently, this only calculates drink recipes for cocktails in the sour family. In the future, I hope to generalize the methods here and also offer cocktail calculation for Old Fashioned, Martini/Manhattan style drinks and everything else.
- The calculated cocktail recipes reflect my tastes to some extent; I hope it will be generally pleasing to most. Even a great cocktail lounge can’t exactly read everyone’s mind as to their taste preferences. In the future, I may offer methods for users to adjust the program to their tastes.
- If you notice extra ingredients that you didn’t input appearing in your recipe, this is because the program had to make some minimal additions in order to get a balanced recipe (for details see the Dealing with no Solutions section of The Algorithm).
- If you don’t include simple syrup (or other sweetener like agave syrup, etc…), you may sometimes find a recipe with far more liqueur(s) than base spirit(s). This happens when the burden of providing sweetness to the drink is placed on some liqueur, which is barely sweet enough to do the job. Try adding simple syrup to your recipe and you should get a drink with a better balance of base spirit(s) and liqueur.
- As long as they are only added in dashes or drops, feel free to add bitters freely to any predicted cocktail because they should not ruin the balance. On the other hand, if you intend to add 1/2 oz measures full of bitters, then this would need to be properly accounted for as an ingredient in the calculation.
- Also feel free to add soda water and make it a long drink. Since it does not possess bite, sour, or sweet, soda water will not ruin the balance of a predicted cocktail.
An example cocktail that I used the program to calculate.
Select as many as 7 ingredients; then click submit for your recipe.