Hello again!
There have been a few weeks of general busy-ness as of recent that have not produced visible results. Part of that is because for some days there has been nothing done. Part of it though is that there have also been days where stuff has been done that is either not visible, or noticeable only to the trained eye.
One of the things I’ve worked on this weekend has been the latter.
One of my goals with cocktail recipes has been to include a great amount of meta information on the cocktails themselves – proof and pour information, as well as other items.
The ingredient database – one of the most fundamental supportive elements of that capability – has existed for a good while now, as it was required to create a canonical, or definitive directory of ingredients, to assist with shopping list generation from menus. Having a recipe with “white sugar”, another with “white granulated sugar”, and another with “caster sugar”, which all are likely referring to the same thing, would require a near AI level of intelligence behind everything and a not so insignificant amount of processing to produce a shopping list. Without a canonical system, the same ingredient might be listed three separate times.
So that exists, and recently I have added additional fields to ingredients, namely ABV (alcohol by volume) to ingredients, so that the recipes can take the fact that we have 30ml of rum, 20ml of triple sec, and 10ml of champagne for instance, assess the ABV of each, add everything up, and calculate the ABV and total ethanol volume of a drink. That was a big advancement – getting it all automated – as the first iteration of the additional cocktail meta was actually me calculating it drink by drink through a spreadsheet and just typing it in. That took me from defining each and every drink, to defining each ingredient once, and having it run rather simple calculations at the time of save / update.
But what I realized in doing that is that it introduces a potential issue. A spirit like vodka is typically 80 proof, or 40% alcohol by volume. Usually, but not always. It’s probably not an issue to just set vodka at 40% and leave it. Same thing with other similar standard spirits.
Where the issue really started creeping in was with liqueurs. The variation there, even for liqueurs with the same general idea, can be quite broad. I had to put a number in – I couldn’t use a range, so I decided that what I needed to do was leave some breadcrumb – for those curious, of where I was deriving this number. It might’ve been acceptable for others to state “oh that’s an average”, but I’ve always been one to show my work, to share in openness how I arrived at the number I did.
Basically, I was going to either need to add some more information to “generic” label ingredient listings like vodka, rum, etc, or I was going to have to create ingredient listings for every flavor of every brand of every liquor.
I decided on the former, for obvious reasons.
I took the ingredient custom post type (a term familiar to those who know WordPress) that I use to store all the ingredient information, opened it up to be visible on the front end, and added a few fields. Essentially what I’ve added is, in addition to the ingredient title and general description, my “reference” product, the one I either use the most, or at least chose to base my numbers off of, as well as a number of alternatives if there are any specifics that I feel really worthwhile to note.
There are certain cases where an ingredient might be listed with a specific brand. Say if we’re using Jägermeister, I would use the actual brand name instead of filing it as the reference product under an “herbal liqueur” moniker, as that’s an incredibly broad and generic ingredient type. But for something like ginger liqueur, citrus vodka, or even white rum, there is no need for a brand-specific ingredient listing; you just use the generic ingredient, and list a reference product.
I think the benefit of opening the ingredient pages up to public visibility and making all the information available is that it takes the user experience to a whole new level. It was already high up there with the recipes assembled into a menu and a shopping list that would come from that. It was made better with the proof / pour / etc meta on the cocktails. And now, it’s made even richer with ingredient pages where I can share more useful information about ingredient selection for those who are curious about something they might not’ve seen or used before. There is so much, not just in the cocktail world, but in the whole cooking world in general that I’ve had to research and learn in order to know not just how to prepare a dish, but also in the ingredients I need to get, and what the actual subtle (and not so subtle) differences are between different things.
The effect of this addition is that you gain access to an immense amount of nuanced information, never more than you want or need, though. Over the coming weeks, as I populate these ingredient pages with reference products and alternatives, the site will transform from a collection of recipes into something more like an educational resource—a place where you can not only find a great cocktail, but understand the reasoning behind every ingredient choice. It’s another step toward making cocktail creation less mysterious and more accessible, which has been the goal from the beginning.