Cocktail Finder

It is Friday night, friends are coming over in an hour, and the drinks cabinet has gin, tonic, a half lemon and some triple sec from last Christmas. You do not need a 600-page bartending manual; you need a list of drinks you can actually make right now. This finder searches a database of thousands of cocktail recipes by ingredient, returns every drink that uses what you typed, and shows the full method when you tap one. Type 'gin' and you get gin and tonic, gimlet, Tom Collins, Negroni and 30+ others.

The search runs against a single ingredient at a time (vodka, rum, lime juice, ginger beer) which is the most reliable way to find recipes when your kitchen is short of one or two specialist items. Once you pick a cocktail, the recipe page lists every ingredient with measurements, the right glass to use and the method written out in plain steps. No upselling, no premium gear required, no recipes that depend on three obscure liqueurs you have to order online.

Most cocktails are more flexible than recipe purists admit. Triple sec, Cointreau and Grand Marnier are all orange-flavoured and interchange well in margaritas and Sidecars, though the higher quality ones taste smoother. Simple syrup is just sugar and water in equal weight; if you do not have any, dissolve 50g of sugar into 50ml of just-boiled water and you have made it. Lemon juice and lime juice are not perfectly interchangeable (limes are sharper, lemons are more rounded) but in a pinch most sour cocktails survive the swap.

What does not swap well: real citrus juice for the bottled stuff (the bottled version is usually too sharp and oddly metallic), and gin styles in stirred cocktails. A London dry like Beefeater behaves differently in a Negroni than a softer style like Hendrick's, which has cucumber and rose notes that fight the Campari. For more on building a drink from scratch by spirit and flavour, the [cocktail recipe generator](/cocktail-recipe-generator) builds drinks from your preferences rather than searching by ingredient.