Most cocktail recipes are written as a list, and I think that hides the important part. A Daiquiri is not "rum, lime, sugar". It is roughly eight parts rum to four parts lime to three parts sugar, and the ratio is the recipe. Change the list and you have a different drink. Change the ratio and you also have a different drink, usually a worse one.

So every recipe here opens as a ring split by volume instead of by line item. The inner ring is the ingredients, the outer ring collects them into their families, and the angle each one takes up is its share of the finished drink. Two recipes with identical ingredient lists and different ratios look visibly different, which is kind of the whole point.

A sunburst is a pie chart that got a second ring. The inner ring splits the whole into parts, the outer ring groups those parts into bigger categories, and every slice keeps its angle proportional to its share. It is the standard way to draw a hierarchy where the quantities matter as much as the grouping.

A cocktail happens to be exactly that shape. A Margarita is tequila, lime juice and orange liqueur, which is the list. It is also roughly two parts spirit to one part citrus to one part sweet, which is the structure. The second description is the one that predicts how it tastes, and it is the one a list cannot show you. Put the ingredients on the inner ring and their families on the outer ring and both readings sit in the same picture: you see that a drink is a sour before you finish reading what is in it.

It is also how you catch a drink that is pretending. Two recipes can carry identical ingredient lists and land in completely different places, and side by side their rings look nothing alike. That is the failure mode of every recipe written as bullet points.

Where a sunburst is bad: it is poor at precise comparison, because people read angles worse than they read lengths, and it falls apart past roughly a dozen slices. Neither limitation bites here, since the median drink in the collection has four ingredients and the question is proportion rather than exact measurement. If you want the number, it is written next to the ingredient. The ring is for the shape.

One honest caveat, covered above: a slice is only as good as the measure behind it, and the estimated ones are marked.

40% of ingredient rows in the collection carry a real quantity, meaning an actual number and an actual unit. Most of those come from Bar Assistant and the IBA specs, which record 60 ml rather than "1 1/2 oz". Those get converted and drawn straight.

The rest arrive as prose, and prose is where recipes get vague. "A dash." "To taste." "Fill with soda." Rather than drop those ingredients out of the picture entirely, the breakdown estimates a volume for them. A dash is about an eighth of a teaspoon, a sugar cube is about half a bar spoon, that sort of thing. Estimated slices are marked as estimated. They are there to keep the ring honest about what is actually in the glass, not to tell you how much to pour.

Recipes that mix measurement systems, like parts and grams, or shots and milliliters, get split into separate rings instead of forced onto one scale. Converting a weight into a volume means knowing a density that the recipe never tells you, and I would rather show two rings than quietly invent a number.

1,857 recipes and 808 distinct ingredients, merged from four openly licensed sources: Bar Assistant (657 recipes), IBA Official Cocktails (2 recipes), TheCocktailDB (356 recipes) and Mr. Boston Official Bartender's Guide (842 recipes). The median drink has four ingredients. The 90 cocktails on the International Bartenders Association official list are flagged as official. Where a source records alcohol by volume, method, garnish, or a note about the drink's history, all of it shows up.

Nothing in here is invented. Every recipe links back to the source that wrote it down, and when two sources disagree about a drink, the more detailed record wins instead of the two getting averaged into something that neither of them says. The sources page walks through how the merge works.

The connection wheel answers the opposite question. Instead of looking up a drink, it shows which ingredients get mixed together across the whole collection and how often. The ingredient builder starts from what is already on your shelf and narrows things down to what you can actually make tonight.