Features
Most things The Pithy Bar can do, on one page. The parts that need an account say so.
Quick search for anything
The magnifying glass in the header - or Ctrl / Cmd + K on a keyboard - reaches every record the site holds by name: cocktails, ingredients, garnishes, glassware, and inventors. It is fuzzy, so a typo or a missing accent still finds the thing, and the results appear under the field without leaving the page. Use it when you already know what something is called.
The cocktail list
The cocktail list is both the index and the search. Filter by what a drink contains and what it must not contain, the glass it is served in, whether it is served hot or cold, how strong it is, how many ingredients it calls for, and the year it was invented.
Mix - Search by what is in the drink
If you want to find recipes based on what is in the drink, you can do so on the Mix search page. Enter a few ingredients and it lists the closest recipes. Unlike the filters this is fuzzy and ranked: a drink using simple syrup is a near answer to a search for honey, and each result says what it puts in place of what you named. Use this feature when you know approximately what you want to put in your drink but want inspiration on what to complement it with, or when you are chasing the drink you had once and half-remember.
Similar cocktails
Every recipe page ends with the drinks nearest to it, so one good cocktail leads to the next. Similarity is computed from what the recipes actually contain - shared ingredients and how close the differing ones sit in the ingredient family tree. Each neighbor says exactly which swaps turn one drink into the other.
My Bar
If you have an account, you can go to My Bar and mark all the ingredients you have access to. The two features that follow build on it.
Recipes you can make
With a bar filled in, the cocktail list gets a filter that keeps only the drinks you have everything for. On a recipe page, the ingredients you are missing are marked as well, so you can see whether you can make a recipe, and what you might have to find a substitute for or go buy.
Within reach
With a bar filled in, Within reach groups the ingredients missing from your bar by what buying them together would add: each heading is one shopping trip, and under it are the drinks it would unlock. Fewest ingredients first, then the most drinks.
An ingredient's own page answers the same question from the other side, saying how many recipes buying it would open up.
Scaling
Set any number of servings and every measurement follows, fractions of a serving included. Step with the plus and minus buttons beside the ingredients, or click the number itself and type an exact number of servings.
Versions of a drink
A cocktail can hold several recipes: a drier take, a stiffer one, a version someone else pours. Where a drink has them, a version menu sits beside its name, and each version has its own address you can link to.
Reference pages
Ingredients, glassware and garnishes each have an index and a page of their own, saying what the thing is, how it differs from the one next to it, and every drink that uses it. Ingredients are a family tree rather than a flat list, so gin holds Old Tom gin holds a specific bottle - and asking for the parent finds all of them.
Vegan mode
The switch beside a recipe's ingredients rewrites its lines to their vegan substitutes - aquafaba for egg white - and marks what cannot be swapped. It stays on until you turn it off, and the cocktail list carries a matching filter. Vegan status is three-valued, because wine and everything made from it can be fined with isinglass or gelatin, a per-producer fact that the recipe cannot know about. Those read "sometimes" rather than a confident yes or no. The ingredient and garnish pages carry the full answer, the reason for it, and every recorded substitute, whether the mode is on or not.
Private notes
Keep a free-text note on any recipe: what you changed, how it went, when you last made it. It is never public. Needs an account.
Your tasting log
Record the times you have tried a drink - whether you mixed it or somebody else did: the day, an optional rating and comment. Each occasion belongs to the version you tried, so two versions of one drink keep separate histories. The whole log is a page of its own, newest first, and the cocktail list can narrow by it - not tried, tried, or rated a particular way. Private, never aggregated with anybody else's, never shareable. Needs an account.
Your own cocktails
You can write your own recipes, and your own versions of drinks the site already has, so everything you mix lives in one place. Your recipes are private to you, and they take part in your browsing, searching, similarity and makeability exactly like the public ones. As you type, the editor tells you when you have written a drink that already has a name - swap simple syrup for honey in a gin sour and you have not invented anything, you have written a Bee's Knees. When a recipe needs an ingredient, garnish or inventor the site does not have, you can add your own - from the ingredient list, or straight from the recipe you are writing. They sit in the same lists as the site's, marked as yours, and nobody else sees them.
Guest access
From your account page you can mint a link that lasts the night, the weekend, a week or a month and signs a guest into your view of the site - printed as a QR code to leave on the counter. For as long as it lasts they get your bar, your recipes and what you can make, and they can update My Bar as bottles run out; they cannot touch how the account signs in. Revoke it whenever you like.
With friends over, they can read your private recipes and add new ones - anything a guest writes belongs to your account.
PWA - Offline and installable
The site installs to a phone home screen or a desktop dock like an app, and pages you have already read stay readable when the network does not. A bar is not always a place with signal.