Cocktail Directory
Your Guide to Cocktails, Sip & Garnish
A good drink starts here.
Most recipe sites present everything with the same confidence, whether someone actually made it or not. We would rather tell you. Each recipe carries one of three statuses, and it means precisely what it says.
Tested. One of us made the drink, to this spec, on the date shown. If a recipe says tested, a human tasted it. These are the minority, and that is deliberate — the badge is worthless if we hand it out.
Standard spec. The drink is built to the widely accepted modern specification, cross-checked against primary sources, but we have not made this exact version in our own kitchen and dated it. The ratios are sound. We just have not personally verified them.
Sourced. The recipe comes from a named book, bar or bartender, and we attribute it. We have not altered it and we have not tested it.
We do not invent ratings. There are no star ratings, review counts or “most popular” numbers on this site unless they come from something real. Fabricated social proof is the easiest thing in the world to add and we are not going to.
We do not pretend a history is settled when it is not. At least four people have been credited with inventing the Margarita. Our page says so and shows the claims, rather than picking the most convenient one and stating it as fact.
We do not take money to place an ingredient. If a specific bottle is recommended in a recipe, it is because it suits the drink. Where a link earns us a commission, it is disclosed on the page, above the link.
Historical claims are cited to their source with author, title and year — Jerry Thomas’s 1862 Bar-Tender’s Guide, Harry Craddock’s 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book, David Wondrich’s Imbibe!, Jeff Berry’s tiki research, Trader Vic’s own 1947 guide, and the IBA’s official list, among others. Where published sources disagree, we show the disagreement.
Recipes here carry the byline C.K. Dilleggi. That is a shared byline for Connie Pileggi and Karen Dillmore, not a single person — we would rather say so plainly than let a name imply a lone expert who does not exist.
We make no claim to professional bartending credentials. What this site offers is careful research, cited sources, and specs we have actually worked through — not authority borrowed from a job title.
The images currently on this site are AI-generated placeholders and are labelled as such. They are illustrations of what a drink looks like, not photographs of a drink we made. They are being replaced with real photography. We would rather say this plainly than let you assume otherwise.