Cocktail Recipes

How this all got started…

My brother (Peter) and I (John) recently retired from long careers working on websites for major corporations.

We live on separate continents, and we wanted to spend more time with each other.

We were looking for a project to work on together that would force us to talk more in a constructive and collaborative way.

At the same time, I became interested in making cocktails and watched a ton of videos from the back catalogue of a YouTuber, Anders Erickson.

My family is from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and I was specifically looking for a guide on how to make a Wisconsin Old Fashioned when I stumbled on his video.

I was immediately drawn to his style, humor and pure joy in making a thing that was born in Wisconsin, our mutual home state. You could see his genuine pride in the concoction created the countless supper clubs of that great state.

It brought me back to my youth: watching a business partner of my father’s making himself an Old Fashioned in my dad’s office. It was really just a Korbel and Squirt but it has stayed with me for all these years.

I kept watching Anders’ videos, and I kept building more cocktails with his guidance. But a laptop doesn’t easily fit on a bar, so I began to build a small collection of web pages. The site kept growing, but it was very manual. It was really more of a list of a bunch of drinks that I loaded on an old spare iPad that I perched precariously in my kitchen on my paper towel rack.

I wanted to be able to access the recipes from more places than just my kitchen, and we have this family website, which my brother manages.

I asked Peter if I could load the recipes to the site, and of course, he was more than happy to help. The first version of the site was just the notes from my iPad, but now available to me from anywhere with an internet connection.

Peter took a look at my very simple, but rapidly growing, list of cocktails and said to himself: “I can make this better…” And he was very right.

He went to work building out a Jekyll-based site that was dynamic, and way easier than hand coding every page. He found all the artwork, and cut it up into individual images, and built several Perl scripts to build the artwork based on the ingredients in each recipe. And even more, scripts to make sub-indexes, a search function, metric conversions and recipe scaling.

I kept plugging along, building out the cocktail list while he added a more solid design to the site. He first moved us off my clunky early look to a more modern design.

Finally, I caught up with Anders’ back catalogue. So I started poking around YouTube, and I found a bunch of other YouTube colleagues of Anders who shared his love of classic cocktails and the joy of teaching others.

I started to watch “The Educated Barfly” (Leandro DiMonriva), “Behind the Bar” (Cara Devine), “How to Drink” (Greg Titian) to get different takes on the cocktail scene.

We still wait every Friday for Anders’ next video to drop every Friday.