
Cocktail Similarity - dlg
https://beta.observablehq.com/@tmcw/cocktail-similarity
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andybak
> A Manhattan is a Martini but you replace dry vermouth with bitters, replace
> gin with sweet vermouth, and add whiskey.

No, it's not.

What's missing is a sense of "role". Spirits should map to spirits, liqueurs
to liqueurs etc.

There's usually only a few "slots" with cocktails: one (or sometimes a few)
base spirits, something aromatic such as bitters or a vermouth, a sweet thing
and/or a citrus.

(I once made a spreadsheet that I dubbed "the period table of cocktails -
turns out the gaps usually lead you to an obscure variation you'd never heard
of)

~~~
dkarl
It's also missing a sense of quantity. Imagine starting a Manhattan with an
ounce of bitters and two ounces of sweet vermouth.

Or the Negroni:

> A Negroni is a Manhattan but you replace bitters with campari and replace
> whiskey with gin.

So a Negroni should have a couple of dashes of Campari.

~~~
gav
> Or the Negroni

Personally I think the classic Negroni is interesting because if you play with
the ingredients (and/or ratios) in the right way you get a lot of interesting
variations:

    
    
      - An Americano is a Negroni without the gin
      - A Boulevardier is a Negroni with the gin swapped for bourbon
      - A Black Negroni is a Negroni with the Campari swapped for an amaro (e.g. Averna)
      - A Negronino is a Negroni with part of the Campari swapped for Amaro Nonino
      - A Quill is a Negroni with the addition of 1/2 oz absinthe
    

(There's boundless others, these are just some of my favorites.)

~~~
neurobashing
I prefer ditching the Campari entirely and using Aperol.

~~~
dkarl
Gin, Aperol, and Lillet Blanc combined like in a Negroni make a beautiful
drink.

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strictnein
Death & Co's second book, "Cocktail Codex" [0], has a somewhat similar
approach. The thrust of the book is that there are six root cocktails, and
everything else is just a variation on them.

That book, and Death & Co's first book, "Modern Classic Cocktails" [1], are
good reads for the person who is a fan of quality cocktails and wants to make
something at home that's really good, and frequently better than what you get
when you're dining out.

You will likely need to invest in some booze and stuff to be able to fully
enjoy them, but just pick a drink a week, buy what you need, and pretty soon
you'll have a collection that will allow you to make most of the things in the
books.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Cocktail-Codex-Fundamentals-
Formulas-...](https://www.amazon.com/Cocktail-Codex-Fundamentals-Formulas-
Evolutions/dp/160774970X)

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Death-Co-Modern-Classic-
Cocktails/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Death-Co-Modern-Classic-
Cocktails/dp/1607745259/)

~~~
dmix
I love Death & Co's first book. I highly recommend it to anyone who likes
having a cocktail after work or making them for parties this book will make
you plenty of friends. Or basically anyone who likes digging into everything
in a connoisseur/nerdy type of way.

Once you learn the foundational stuff of making cocktails (with a small
investment in some gear and plenty on a variety of booze) it's surprisingly
easy to make really good drinks. What I found interesting is how you
intuitively starting learning some fundamental bases which you learn, where it
becomes easy to make up your own drinks when you don't have access to the
book's ingredient lists or you're at the liquor store without one in mind.

It's not just an endless list of popular cocktails recipes but structures it
around bases which you build on. And it made me a big fan of gin (they almost
entirely skip vodka, besides a few recipes, which I found interesting).

Learning how to make cocktails is underrated skillset IMO. At least compared
to people knowing scotch or understanding good wines.

~~~
cmarj
The first book is amazing for gin recipes. It also gave me a much greater
appreciation for how different types of gin work in different cocktails. Their
follow-up book, Cocktail Codex, includes a lot more recipes for drinks with
vodka.

------
whiddershins
So I got:

“A Manhattan is a Martini but you replace dry vermouth with bitters, replace
gin with sweet vermouth, and add whiskey.”

This is the wrong way to think about it. The rye (aka “whiskey”) in a
Manhattan is conceptually and functionally equivalent to the gin in the
martini.

The graph doesn’t seem to understand the concept of base liquor, which makes
it a really cool exercise, but not functional.

Still, I love the idea.

------
collinf
"A Manhattan is a Screwdriver but you replace orange juice with bitters,
replace vodka with sweet vermouth, and add whiskey."

Can't wait to explain this one to my bartender tonight!

~~~
johnmaguire2013
Yeah, I think Manhattan/Martini is a closer comparison than Manhattan/Old
Fashioned or Manhattan/Screwdriver...

~~~
jghn
You're right.

The Manhattan & Martini both derive lineage from the Old Fashioned. The Old
Fashioned was so named in the late 19th century as it was trying to recreate
the original cocktail, as in "Don't give me one of those drinks with all the
stuff in it, give me an old fashioned cocktail".

The Martini derives from the Martinez which is a much sweeter drink. Heavy on
sweet vermouth and using a heavier & sweeter style of gin. It should be clear
at that point that the Martinez and Manhattan aren't super far apart.

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tyingq
I use Levenshtein matching for a small business. We take in orders, and some
of them end up being ordered from a partner that ships them out. They often
change the shipping address in small ways, and don't provide a nice api for us
to match orders to tracking numbers. Instead, we just get an email from Fedex
or UPS.

So, we trawl IMAP to extract the addresses and find close matches for open
orders with Levenshtein. Not perfect, especially when one customer places more
than one order, but saves us a lot of time.

~~~
nerdponx
For addresses, I believe USPS provides a free address standardization API as
long as you are using it for shipping purposes.

~~~
tyingq
This is a bit different. It's matching what you have versus what a 3rd party
has. You have no control over the third party.

We do use SmartyStreets to normalize the address before submitting, but the
3rd party uses something else. Also, address correction is a weird space. UPS,
for example, delivers to many places that the USPS does not. Rural communities
are especially tricky. UPS, Fedex, and USPS disagree on things like "Rural
Route 24" vs "State Route 24" versus "Arizona Route 24".

~~~
craz8
Fun fact: my address gets corrected to one on the other side of town with a
South suffix added. The Post Office, UPS and FedEx all have manual procedures
in place to handle this case. No-one has yet to fix their software more than
to flag a manual review at the local office

~~~
aero142
Have you thought about requesting to change the number of your house to one
that doesn't exist on the other side of town? That is usually much easier and
cheaper than changing the street name.

------
dahart
Since order and ingredient category does matter for some cocktails, you could
really geek out on this a lot farther, and take it way off the deep end...
categorize by liquor base, by mixers, by sweet or savory flavorings, by
solidity, by acidity, by temperature, by water/ice content, by garnishes,
etc., etc., and then use edit distance on trees rather that on sets.

~~~
rsync
"Since order and ingredient category does matter for some cocktails..."

I'm skeptical that ingredient order makes any difference in a cocktail (unless
you're doing things like setting them on fire, etc.) ... could you provide an
example ?

~~~
dahart
Setting drinks on fire is a decent example that is alone enough to justify
what I said. Some people care whether you pour over ice or put ice in the
drink. Whether they can tell the difference is anyone’s guess. “Lace” is
cocktail terminology for the last ingredient. Muddling is another example; you
don’t muddle after you mix. Sugary syrups and other infusions definitely
change a drink’s character depending on mixing order, many drinks call for
being _less_ mixed so you get a different taste at the beginning vs the finish
at the end.

You can also think about recipes and cocktail names; order does matter to the
corpus of recipes and lore and creative naming of drinks as much as it may (or
may not) matter to taste. I didn’t invent cocktail history, so it’s not
exactly my place to defend this, but I believe it’s fair to say that there are
lots of recipes that call for ingredients in a specific order, in addition to
all the examples where order is clearly needed/used.

------
dragonwriter
> Cocktail edit distance is a bit different - primarily because order doesn’t
> matter. It’s just set difference, or set distance.

Well, no, quantity matters for cocktails, which puts it in the opposite
direction of set distance from a comparison where only order matters in terms
of complexity.

~~~
kennywinker
This is true, but the fuzzyness of cocktail ratios makes ingredient quantity
_very_ hard to use for something like this. What is the ratio of gin to
vermouth in a martini? Depends on who is making it.

~~~
ska
You picked one of the fuzziest examples. Lots of cocktail ratios are much more
rigid than martinis.

Construction methods also matter.

------
peterwwillis
The problem with this analysis is lack of depth. Changing any step of the
recipe (the ingredients, measurements, temperatures, cooking vessels, order of
operations, even presentation) can result in vastly different products.

Firstly, you need similar measurements. Second, replacing one ingredient for
another affects the chemical composition that directly influences the
perceived flavor (sweet, bitter, sour, salt, fat). Third, the physical acts of
stirring vs shaking affect texture, temperature, and dilution all at once.

All this would need to be added to the model to begin to approximate actually
similar cocktails, and not just a comparison like _" Hey, you can take the
sugar and eggs out of cake and make bread!"_

(The fact that the author conflates sweet and dry vermouth is also not great;
that's like confusing a Riesling with Extra Brut Champagne)

------
bonniemuffin
I spotted an interesting data standardization anomaly:

"A The Last Word is a Gin Gimlet but you replace simple syrup with green
chartreuse, replace lime juice with maraschino, and add lime."

It appears that "lime juice" and "lime" exist as separate ingredients in the
ingredient lists, even though they're exactly the same thing. It looks like
this is causing a false separation of the Last Word cluster (drinks containing
"lime") from the Gimlet cluster (drinks containing "lime juice") in the 2D
plots.

~~~
mason55
Gimlets are more often made with lime cordial, marketed as Rose’s lime juice.
This is different from fresh lime juice in that it has sugar and other stuff
added.

[https://www.jeffreymorgenthaler.com/lime-
cordial/](https://www.jeffreymorgenthaler.com/lime-cordial/)

~~~
bonniemuffin
Interesting. I have two concerns with your "lime means Rose's lime juice"
hypothesis.

(1) When I google "gin gimlet recipe", all search results I looked at (the top
4) call for "fresh lime juice" as the ingredient, leading me to believe that
fresh lime juice is more common as a gimlet ingredient. The article you linked
even states that fresh lime is more common: "A lot of bartenders out there
adopt the fresh-lime-juice-and-sugar method of making lime cordial."

(2) Why would a recipe use the word "lime" to refer to Rose's lime juice? It
seems like no one would ever be able to make the cocktail correctly if they
had to infer that "lime" refers to Rose's lime juice rather than fresh lime
juice.

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chiefalchemist
It was explained to me that cocktails are a combination of flavors. That is,
for example, sweet + dry + sour + ... you get the point. Making a good
cocktail is about balancing those various attributes, based on the
characteristics of the base ingredients.

~~~
ambicapter
> cocktails are a combination of flavors

Isn't this all recipes?

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btbuildem
I think this project would've benefitted from consulting a good bartender --
or at least a barfly - to identify the key dimensions and the scaling vectors.

As other commenters pointed out, there's a whole science behind how the
ingredients associate.

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golemotron
What cosmology of mixology doesn't have a G&T?

~~~
twic
That's a mixed drink, not a cocktail!

------
stendinator
Should've called it Cocktail Hamming Distance

