Bar
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This site
Cocktail maxxing on a budget.
You only need a few bottles to start exploring the fundamentals of classic cocktails.
Juice with vodka is a regression. Plenty of modern drinks came out of these older shapes, and those flavor profiles are still terribly underrated.
I built a small utility. Broad categories, few ingredients, little expense. The complete catalog of classic and modern drinks, with every niche bottle named, can wait until you know what you actually like.
I love cocktail books. Hunting down a niche brand and some exotic bottle just to make a drink I might not even like is a frustrating way to learn. Here you tick what you have, and the menu shows which bottle opens the most drinks next.
My shelf, my menu.
Craig Johnston
Using it
Your shelf
Tick what you own on the Bar tab. The menu then knows what you can pour, and the number beside a bottle you do not have is how many new drinks buying it opens. Tap that number to see them.
Finding a drink
The search box takes a name, an ingredient or a code. A name and an ingredient ignore capitals, so rye finds Rye. A code does not, because capitals are what the shorthand uses instead of extra letters: q is a quarter ounce and Q is three quarters. Searching Q gives you the drinks with a three-quarter pour and leaves the quarters out.
Reading a drink
Tap a drink for the recipe. The small code beside the name is the shorthand off my printed menu, and the Key tab decodes every letter of it.
Sharing
Share menu turns your shelf into one link. Opening somebody's link shows you what their bar pours and leaves your own shelf alone until you tap Make this my shelf. A single drink shares the same way, from the Share tab inside its recipe.
Printing
Print menu gives you the list you are looking at in black and white, two columns on US Letter. The ticks decide whether the glass, the recipe, the taste, the history and the shorthand key come with it.
Offline
Add it to your home screen and it keeps working with no signal. Your shelf is stored on your phone. There is no account and nothing to sign into.
Tools
These are the tools I use. Nothing on the menu needs anything else.
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Boston shaker
Two metal tins. The small one goes into the big one at an angle and a slap on the side breaks the seal. I shake every shaken drink in this and stir the stirred ones in the big tin. I do not own a mixing glass.
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Japanese jigger
Two ounces on one side and one ounce on the other, with the measurements etched on the inside where you can see them while you pour. The 2 oz side is marked at 1, 1 1/2 and 2. The 1 oz side is marked at 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 and 1. That covers every measurement in these recipes. I use two of them. Most of the sticky ingredients are an ounce or less, so I measure those on the 1 oz side of the second jigger and never have to flip a sticky jigger back over to the 2 oz side.
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Hawthorne strainer
The spring fits inside the rim of the tin and holds the ice back while the drink pours through. I use it for stirred and shaken drinks both. Pushing the gate forward tightens the gap when a shaken drink has ice shards in it.
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Barspoon
Long and twisted with a teardrop bowl. A b in the shorthand is one level barspoon. The twist lets it spin between two fingers in the tin without pushing the ice around.
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Citrus peeler
A Y peeler. It takes a wide, thin strip of peel and leaves the pith on the fruit. That strip is the twist: l is lemon, L is lime, o is orange.
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Paring knife
A small pointed knife. I halve citrus with it before juicing and cut lime wheels and apple fans with it. Lw is a lime wheel and a is an apple fan.
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Dasher bottles
Bitters come in bottles that give an uneven dash. A dasher bottle gives the same dash every time, so 2 dashes of Angostura is the same amount in every drink.
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Pourers
Speed pourers in the bottles I open most. A pourer gives a thin, steady stream, so a jigger fills to the line without a glug.
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Bar mat
A rubber mat to build drinks on. It catches drips and keeps a wet tin from sliding around.
Glassware
Three glasses cover the whole menu. The rocks glass and the highball are a given. The third is a Nick & Nora, and it is the one I want to make a case for.
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Nick & Nora
The c in the shorthand. A small stemmed glass with a bowl more upright than a coupe. Every drink served up goes in one of these, no ice.
It is the perfect catch-all for the coupe. A Margarita is as elegant in it as a neat sherry, and you would feel silly sipping sherry from an audacious Margarita glass. The Martini glass is a versatile coupe too, but an odd choice for a dessert wine. Everything looks elegant in a Nick & Nora.
Nothing here stops you amassing an impressive collection of specialty glassware. I am only saying that a couple of rocks glasses and a couple of Nick & Noras in the fridge means you are ready at a moment's notice to serve anything chilled.
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Rocks glass
The r and the R. A short tumbler with a heavy base. r is empty, R has ice: one large cube, or cubes, depending on the drink.
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Highball glass
The h and the H. A tall glass. h is a fizz with no ice, so the foam has room. H is packed with ice with the mixer poured over it.
About me
I have been enjoying adult beverages for almost thirty years. The early years were cheap beer and cheaper vodka, and a cocktail meant a sugar-bombed mixer with vodka from a plastic bottle hiding inside it. An Appletini. A Flaming Dr. Pepper. That was the culture I grew up in, the alcopop years, when a cocktail was a fruity drink designed to get you drunk without tasting the alcohol. I never took to those drinks, but the profile stuck in my head for decades.
In my thirties I drank scotch. Neat, on the rocks, or with soda, and that was the only thing I ordered, because it was as far as I could get from the sugar and the cheap vodka. I even looked down on whiskey, which I took for a lesser scotch you tossed into a Coke for a buzz.
At forty I needed to lose a lot of weight, so I quit drinking for a couple of years. That turned out to be the palate cleanser I needed. I started reading about classic cocktails, and the history was fascinating. I kept reading the recipes and did not find one that called for Jell-O. I ordered a few cocktail books and made a point of visiting the well-regarded cocktail lounges around Southern California, where I live.
Eight years later I had put together a bar of my own, bottle by bottle. Four books did most of the work: Raising the Bar by Brett Adams and Jacob Grier, Death & Co: Modern Classic Cocktails by David Kaplan, Nick Fauchald and Alex Day, Cocktail Codex by Alex Day, Nick Fauchald and David Kaplan, and Meehan's Bartender Manual by Jim Meehan.
I designed a menu, bought a nice menu sleeve, and whenever I had company I handed it over. The only things I have to keep fresh are a few pieces of citrus and the syrups I rotate monthly. With a modest bar I could make fifty to seventy-five classic cocktails.
This year I put that menu online. Not as a business; I wanted the features, and I might as well share them. I wanted to tick off the bottles I have and see what I can make, and to see that if I go to the store for one more bottle it adds seven drinks to the menu. And I wanted the menu to always be what I can actually make, so that when a guest asks which of these I can pour right now, the answer is all of them.
Analytics
This site is a hobby. I run Google Analytics on it so I can see how it gets used: which tab someone opened, which drink they expanded, which bottle they ticked, whether a menu was printed or shared. Cloudflare, which sits in front of the site, also counts page views and how fast the pages load with a script of its own, and it sets no cookie. Those two are the whole list.
Neither tells me who you are. There is no account, no sign-in, no name attached to any of it. Your shelf stays on your phone unless you share it yourself. I do not sell the numbers and I do not market to anyone. I read them so I know which parts of this are worth more work. So far nobody has ever opened a Tip Top, and it is a great drink.
The events are in the source: track() in assets/app.js. Cloudflare adds its script on the way out, so it is not in the source. A content blocker stops both and the site works exactly the same.
Version
You are running dev. Every release is at github.com/cjimti/drink/releases.
A wrong measure or a bad date is an issue at github.com/cjimti/drink/issues.
© 2026 Craig Johnston
Pouring…