Cocktail Directory
Your Guide to Cocktails, Sip & Garnish
A good drink starts here.
This site is about making drinks well, not about drinking a lot of them. A good cocktail is worth taking your time over. Most of the recipes here are stronger than they taste, which is exactly why we publish the numbers.
In the United States, one standard drink contains roughly 0.6 fl oz (14 g) of pure alcohol. That is about 12 oz of regular beer, 5 oz of wine, or 1.5 oz of 80-proof spirits.
Cocktails rarely line up neatly with that. A Martini built to the spec on this site is close to two standard drinks, in a glass you can finish in ten minutes. An Aperol Spritz is under one. Both look like “a drink.”
Every alcoholic recipe here shows an estimated ABV and an estimated standard-drink count, calculated from the ingredient volumes, their alcohol content, and the dilution that the technique adds. They are estimates, not laboratory measurements — brands vary, ice varies, and how long you stir changes the result. Treat them as a guide to relative strength, not a precise figure.
Dilution is part of the recipe. Shaking and stirring add water. That is not a flaw; it is what makes a spirit-forward drink drinkable. Skipping it makes a drink both harsher and stronger.
Home pours are usually bigger than bar pours. If you are not measuring, you are probably making a larger drink than you think. A jigger is the cheapest accuracy upgrade available.
Batching hides strength. A pitcher makes it hard to track how much anyone has had. If you batch, say what the serving size is.
Alcohol-free is a real option here. We take mocktails seriously and build them to the same structure as everything else — acid, sweetness, bitterness, texture. They are not an apology.
If you or someone close to you is worried about drinking, these are free and confidential:
You must be of legal drinking age to make the alcoholic recipes on this site. In the United States that is 21.