Introducing Decent Cocktails
For the past decade, I've been working on designing and making a open source scale. Last year, we finally managed it (I think) with the Half Decent Scale.
I'm also really into cocktails, but rubbish at it. My wife has the knack, but she's often too busy to make a drink, so I need to follow a recipe. Googling recipes often got me not-very-good ones.
I lean on two cocktail books: The PDT Cocktail Book, and Death & Co: Modern Classic Cocktails as they've never given me a bad recipe. I prefer having a smaller selection, but knowing they're all good.
Fellow Decent programmer Mark Chau is also into cocktails, and one of the first tasks I gave him was to write a cocktail-making app in Chrome, that spoke to our scale. He also developed a Javascript library to talk to the scale.
Your Bar. Log in with a free Decent account, tell it which bottles you have, and it shows the cocktails you can make right now.
As this is all in a sqlite database, the site can show you only the cocktails you can make, as you browse, or tell you what you're missing.
It suggests alternatives (when feasible) for things you're missing.
It was just a database query to tell me what to buy to unlock the most recipes. A hour later I walked into Gerry's Liquors in Soho London. £250 poorer the cocktails "you can make" jumped from 17 to 103.
I want a cocktail that uses two ingredients, say "whisky and lemon" or "gin and orange juice"
Make it on a scale. If you have our Half Decent Scale, press the scale button on any recipe and the page connects to the scale over Bluetooth (in Chrome on a computer, in Android, or in Safari with a plugin on iOS) and walks you through the drink: it tares for each ingredient and tells you when you've poured the right amount.
There's also an API, so a program or an AI assistant can look up a recipe but also interact with your bar and profile.
Decent Cocktails is free, and you don't need an account to use it. .
My favorite new discovery so far is Swollen Gland.
If you're wondering how we can publish this, it's because recipes and names are not copyrightable and that's the only thing obtained from those two books.
john created 2026/10/26.