Finding Cocktail Recipes

Whether you’re trying to find a new cocktail recipe for your drink-of-the-month club, for a cocktail party, or just for your own enjoyment, you have literally thousands of sources available.  Besides websites (links given below), there are plenty of recipes available in hardcopy.  Magazines like Food & Wine and Gourmet are always presenting new recipes for seasonal cocktails.  There are plenty of books available, too.  If you’re on a budget, look in used bookstores or on Amazon Marketplace.  Don’t buy too many yourself; once your friends and family know about your interest in cocktails, they’ll have books and barware in mind for gift ideas around your birthday and the holidays.  I like to have a copy of Robyn M. Feller’s The Complete Bartender on hand because it’s easier to access a book than my laptop during a cocktail party.  (As an amateur bartender, there are many, many cocktail recipes that I don’t know.)  I’ve enhanced my copy for fast access by tagging the first page for each letter with a little post-it tag.

BarNoneDrinks contains a lot of cocktail recipes and other info, including a huge online dictionary of cocktail ingredients.

DrinkStreet has loads of drink recipes and an online basic-bartending course.  This is one of the first sites I found when I got interested in cocktails; and I use this useful and entertaining site often.

DrinkNation claims over 8,000 drink recipes, and their advanced search gives you a lot of options for finding drinks.

Webtender calls itself an On-Line Bartender.  While it can’t pour you a cocktail, it has a lot of cocktail recipes.  It makes up for its lack of visual appeal with a good drink database (over 6,000 drinks).

For a kick, Project Gutenberg has an online copy of a 1917 book, The Ideal Bartender by Tom Bullock, that includes a lot of classic recipes.

For you Martini lovers, MartiniArt has a catalog site that also includes a lot of great Martini recipes.

If any of you post links to good sites in responses, I’ll update this list so the links will be all together for future readers.