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One thing I love about cocktails is their variety. So it took me a lot of years and lot "I ordered this so I guess I'll drink it..." moments to figure out what I actually enjoy. Every now and then, you meet a great bartender who knows the territory and happens to have the time to really understand what you might like (Cecily at ABV 10 years ago, stands out in mind). But if you're not lucky enough to run into your own Cecily, and especially if you don't exactly speak the local language of spirits yet, this page is here to help you learn the territory, and hopefully find your next favorite by starting with the familiar, and moving into similar territory.
But then I went down a rabbit hole trying to figure out how to define "similar." I started quantifying ingredients across taste components, and that was straightforward, if painstaking. I wound up with 15 dimensions for each ingredient (sweet, bitter, saline, acid, herbal, spice, citrus, floral, fruit, smoke, oak, grain, vegetal, nutty, anise).
Then you have to make a cocktail, and that gets complicated. A Negroni and a Martinez have very similar recipes (gin, sweet vermouth, and then Campari or maraschino liqueur, respectively), but the Campari adds a punch of bitterness that makes them quite different. A margarita and a gin gimlet come from different worlds, but they're both citrus-forward cocktails with a sweet and sour balance. How do we map that out?
In the end, I decided... not to decide. Instead, I built this tool to explore the territory, and see how different ways of thinking about cocktails can lead to different insights, and hopefully find some new favorites.