Every drink is a measurement.
Build a cocktail and read what it actually is. Scale a batch, clarify the juice, dial the acid, set the pressure, price the pour. The numbers, on the bench, in your browser.
Read the drink before you shake it.
Type in a build and read what it actually is: strength, sweetness, tartness, and how much water the ice will add. Then check it against the target for the style you picked.
Pick an ingredient to auto-fill its numbers, or type your own. Tap edit to fine-tune any value.
One recipe, times any crowd.
Pick a cocktail, tell it how much you need (servings, volume, or bottles of spirit), and it does the math and walks the batch.
Not batching? Single-serve specs — the classics and the deep end — live in the Cocktail Library.
The batch
The method
Batch & serve
Specs worth borrowing.
Single-serve builds, no batch math — the canon on one shelf, the deep end on the next. Open a spec to make it tonight, or send it to the Balance Lab and make it yours. Drinks you save as single cocktails file themselves here.
Each of these leans on a tool from this bench — the Lab's infusions, washes and shrubs, the Juice tool's clarification and acid work, the Carbonate tool's pressure math. The badge names the technique; several are homework straight out of Dave Arnold's Liquid Intelligence.
The spec
Between the fruit and the glass.
Estimate how much citrus to buy, clarify it clean, and match its acid to whatever a spec calls for.
Citrus yield
Fruit in, juice out
Estimate juice from a pile of fruit, or how much fruit to buy for a juice target. Hand-squeeze baseline; a press pulls more.
Yields from USDA and bar references. Adapted from The Forager Bar citrus yield calculator. Estimates only, real fruit varies with size and ripeness.
Clarify
Gel clarification
Which method fits the juice, and every gram and ounce to weigh out. Quick agar or freeze-thaw.
Gel clarification loses at least a quarter of your juice. This app budgets 30% (yield 0.7).
Weigh this out
Quick agar method
Same day, no centrifuge
Acid adjust
Make one juice drink like another
Add citric and malic acid so a juice matches a target fruit's tartness. Good for swapping in a softer juice, matching a spec, or rebuilding acid a clarified or zero-proof drink lost. This is the same acid the Balance tool reads as a single acid %, split here into the two acids you actually weigh.
Acid profiles from USDA and published food-chemistry data. Adapted from The Forager Bar acid adjustment calculator. Taste and adjust; acid is half sensory.
Juice log · QC
Measure it, then trust it
Real fruit drifts week to week. Log a Brix reading (refractometer) and an acid reading (titration or strips) per juice lot, and the Balance Lab uses your latest measurement instead of the library estimate.
Cold, clear, and under pressure.
Clarity, coldness, composition. Get those right, then set the pressure by strength and gas it twice.
Pressure by strength
What PSI?
The magic ratio
Build a carbonated drink
Rule of thumb: every 5.5 oz of carbonated drink holds 1.75–2 oz of 40–50% spirit. Lands around 14–16% ABV. Tastes watery flat, right once it's gassed.
Aim for 0.4–0.5% acid (a short ½ oz clarified lime) and 5–7.7% sugar. Everything reads weak flat.
No time to build a mixer?
Fluff a finished drink
Keep the spirit in the freezer (~ −20°C), the mixer in the fridge, build, and carbonate right away.
Reference
CO₂ levels
| 1 volume of CO₂ | 2 g/L |
| Cola | ~7 g/L |
| Orange soda, root beer | ~5 g/L |
| Seltzer, tonic | 8–9 g/L |
| Young champagne (12.5% ABV) | 11.5–12 g/L |
CO₂ dissolves better in alcohol, so a boozy drink needs more gas to taste as fizzy. Weigh the capped-off bottle before and after to read grams added.
Draft program
Cocktails on tap
Size the keg, set the regulator, count the pours. For long, low-proof drinks (spritzes, lengthened highballs under ~8% ABV) this uses the standard carbonation equation. Full-strength carbonated cocktails need more gas than it predicts; use the Pressure card above for those.
Weigh it, don't wing it.
The prep-side math: sous vide times and ratios, fermentation percentages, and what a drink costs to pour. Numbers first, so the creative part starts from solid ground.
Sous vide & infusion
Time, temperature, ratio
Pick the prep, tell it how much base you're working with, and it returns the bath setting, the clock, and the grams to weigh. Ratios reconcile with the technique cards in Reference.
Fermentation bench
Salt, sugar & time
The percentages behind lacto ferments, a ginger bug, and a quick shrub. Weigh everything; fermentation is a percentage game.
Milk wash
Silk, by the litre
Size the milk and the acid for a wash. Same ratios as the Reference technique card: a quarter of the spirit's volume in whole milk, broken with citrus or citric acid.
- Pour spirit into milk, that direction, stirring as you go. It curdles on contact with the acid.
- Rest it cold for a few hours; overnight is better. The curd carries the harshness out.
- Strain through the curd (cloth or coffee filter). The first pass looks awful; recirculate until it runs bright.
Pour cost
What it costs, what to charge
Bottle price in, cost per pour and a menu price out. The industry benchmark is a 20% pour cost; spirits programs often run 18–20.
Buy enough — not a truckload.
How much to buy for an event. Tell it the headcount and the hours, and it works out the drinks and the bottles, using the same pour sizes and bottle math as the rest of the bench.
The event
Balance the bar
Split the cocktails & the wine
Weight the cocktail count across the spirits you're pouring (parts, not percent — 2 counts double 1, 0 skips it), and split the wine between red and white.
How many drinks
Shopping list
What to buy
The numbers behind the bar.
The house preps, the techniques, the numbers behind the tools, and a converter for the times a recipe is in the other unit.
Converter
Real conversion is 29.57 ml/oz. Some references round to 30 ml/oz for recipe copy, so cross-checking can drift a hair.
Style targets
Where a finished drink should land
Distilled from published cocktail science across dozens of classics plus carbonated and blended builds. Ranges, not laws.
Batching rules
Premixing for a crowd
When you make one drink, you taste and adjust by feel. A batch takes that feedback loop away, so the goal is to land it right before it's mixed. The tricky part is that some ingredients don't scale evenly.
| Up to ~5 drinksthe balance barely shifts at this size | multiply straight |
| Past ~5 drinkscitrus, sweetener & bitters start to dominate | start at ¾, taste up |
| Dilutionabout 25% of a served drink is water | add before serving |
| Stirred & boozythe alcohol keeps it from freezing solid | pre-dilute, freeze |
| Shaken drinksthe ice adds the water when you shake | batch dry, no water |
| Anything sparklingso it doesn't go flat | top at service |
Spirit-forward stirred drinks (Negroni, Manhattan, Old Fashioned) hold for weeks cold and only improve as they marry. Citrus batches are same-day.
Technique · Bottled batches
Batch it, bottle it, pour it neat
The pro way to pre-batch a stirred drink: build it by volume, add the water the ice would have added, then bottle and chill so it pours ready with no dilution to do. Spirit-forward batches keep for weeks and can live in the freezer, where the alcohol stops them freezing.
Worked example, a Manhattan for thirty:
| Rye whiskey | 3 × 750 ml |
| Sweet vermouthCarpano Antica or similar | 1 L |
| Angostura bitters | 1 oz |
| Filtered waterstands in for stirring dilution | 1,700 ml |
| Yields | 30 drinks · 26% ABV |
Scale any recipe like this in the Batch tool, then read the "batch oz" total, hold back the water for a shaken drink, and bottle. Small format: for seven, use 14 oz rye, 6¼ oz vermouth, ¼ oz bitters, 10½ oz ice water.
Technique · Punch
Big-format, one big block
Punch breaks the citrus-equals-shaken rule. It's stirred, not shaken, because it's finished with soda or sparkling wine for lift.
| Stir, don't shake | over ice, or roll between pitchers |
| Sweetener | syrup, or muddled sugar cubes |
| Spice component | often tea-infused spirit |
| Serve over | one large block |
| Bubbles & garnish | added at the bowl |
One big block melts slowly, so the punch stays cold without watering out. Float the garnishes and let guests scoop their own.
Technique · Milk washing
Silk out a spirit
Wash a straight spirit (not a finished drink) with milk to strip harsh, astringent tannins and leave a silky body. Stir the spirit into the milk, break it with acid, and the casein curdles and carries the harshness out. The whey that stays behind whips into a rich head when you shake.
- Infuse first if you like (tea, coffee, cacao), then strain. Milk washing tames strong infusions beautifully.
- Pour spirit into milk, that direction, while stirring. Rough figure: about 250 ml whole milk per 1 L of spirit.
- Break it with acid, roughly 1 oz lemon juice or a spoon of citric solution per litre. The milk curdles on contact.
- Let it settle, then filter out the curds through a jelly bag or unbleached cotton until it runs clear.
- Use within a week. The whey's foaming power fades after that. Don't carbonate a milk-washed drink, it foams too hard.
Technique · Fat washing
Wash flavor in
The reverse move: wring a good fat's flavor into a spirit. Pick a fat that tastes great on its own, brown butter, toasted sesame oil, good bacon fat, then chill it out and leave the flavor behind.
- Pick the ratio by strength. Strong fats (bacon, sesame): about 120 g per 750 ml. Delicate fats (butter): about 240 g per 750 ml.
- Combine. Melt a solid fat, add it to the spirit in a wide-mouth jar, and shake to spread the contact.
- Rest about an hour, agitating now and then, so the flavor migrates into the spirit.
- Freeze a few hours. The fat sets into a puck on top. Poke through it and pour the clear spirit off through a coffee filter.
- Oils that won't set (like olive) come off with a gravy separator or separatory funnel instead.
House preps
Ingredient library
What the Balance tool reads from
Seed values, some measured, some estimated. Edit them in the file to match what you actually pour. ABV %, sugar g/100 ml, acid %.
The bookshelf
Where these numbers come from
The bench stands on published work. When a curve here disagrees with the drink in front of you, trust the drink — but these are the references worth owning.
| Liquid Intelligence — Dave Arnold, 2014carbonation, clarification, acid adjusting — and most of the Library's deep-end homework | chilling, clarity & CO₂ |
| Death & Co: Modern Classic Cocktails — Kaplan, Fauchald & Day, 2014the batching appendix behind the Batch tool's rules | batching & specs |
| The Noma Guide to Fermentation — Redzepi & Zilber, 2018the 2%-of-total-weight lacto standard on the fermentation bench | ferments |
| The Forager Bar calculatorsthe citrus-yield and acid-adjustment models, adapted with credit | yield & acid |
| Industry pour-cost benchmarks — Toast, Backbar, WebstaurantStorethe 20% target on the Lab's costing card | costing |