How to organize your cocktail recipes

If you’ve been making drinks for more than a few months, your collection probably looks like this: a folder on your phone with all your cocktail screenshots. A notes app with some recipes typed out, some half-typed. A paper notebook from when you were feeling analog. Maybe a spreadsheet from when you were feeling organized. As one r/cocktails poster put it: “My own collection has gotten so scattered that I’m having trouble keeping it all straight.”

The storage isn’t the real problem. The real problem is retrieval — five places to check means you check none of them, and remake the drink from memory. And memory is a bad spec sheet: you remember it was a little too sweet last time, but not what you changed, so the fix gets lost and next time you’re guessing again.

A paper notebook. Great at the bar top, great to flip through, feels like craft. But it isn’t searchable, it isn’t backed up, and one spilled shaker tin or lost bag takes the whole collection with it.

A notes app. Free, always in your pocket, searchable — sort of. Cocktail recipes end up buried between grocery lists and to-do items, there’s no structure (was that 3/4 oz or 1/2?), and scaling a recipe for a party means doing fractions by hand.

A spreadsheet. The power-user move, and people make it work. Sortable columns, one row per drink. But it’s miserable to read while making a drink, photos don’t fit, and entering a recipe is enough friction that the screenshots folder keeps growing anyway.

A cocktail app. Most cocktail apps are catalogs of someone else’s recipes with your bar bolted on. The catalog is the product; your recipes are an afterthought — and app-store reviews of the big ones are full of people whose own creations vanished after saving. If you’re going to trust an app, the test is what happens to the recipes you enter, not the ones that ship with it.

One r/cocktails commenter said it in three words: “It turns out, all I really want is a searchable notebook.” That’s the spec. Concretely, it means:

• -Everything in one place — typed in, pasted from a URL, or pulled off a screenshot. If getting a recipe in takes more than a minute, the folder of screenshots wins by default.
• -Your changes stick. “A little too sweet last time” should become an edited spec, not a memory.
• -Search that works while your hands are wet — by name, by ingredient, by how it’s made.
• -A way out. It’s only a matter of time before any app dies. Yours shouldn’t take your recipes with it — export matters more than any feature.

Mixed Spirits is that searchable notebook. Paste a URL, a block of text, or a photo of a recipe — including the screenshots already on your phone — and AI import turns it into a structured recipe card: ingredients, method, garnish, glassware. Tweak a spec and the card keeps your version. Batch it for a party with real math instead of napkin fractions. And your whole library exports as JSON, so it’s yours even if you leave.