FAQ

Questions, answered.

Quick answers to the questions that come up most — how the app works, how your bar and palate are scored, and how we source and verify every recipe. For the longer version of any of these, the guides go deeper.

Using the app

Where do I log a pour?: Anywhere you see "Log a pour": a drink's page, the + menu on any tab, a bar's page (which fills in the bar for you), or an event you're going to (which tags the pour to it). It's the same form every time, and every pour lands in the same journal.
What's the difference between saving a drink and logging a pour?: Saving bookmarks a drink into your collection — it doesn't mean you've had it. Logging a pour is the opposite: a record that you actually drank something, where, and what you thought. They're independent, but the pour form offers to save the drink too when you log one you don't already have.
Is Riffed free?: Yes — search, every drink and its chart, riffing, your bar, your palate, pours, events, and friends are all free and stay free. Riffed Premium adds AI palate insights, a bigger AI-assistant allowance, and more artwork generations on top.

Your bar & what you can make

What do the badges on a drink mean?: Make now (a check) means you have everything. Riff ready (the riff icon) means one bottle you own can stand in for what's missing. 1–2 away means you're one bottle short — or two, on drinks with four or more ingredients — with nothing on your shelf close enough to cover it. All three are scored against whatever bar is in view — yours, a friend's, or a venue's.
Does a missing garnish stop me from making a drink?: No. Garnishes never count against a drink's make now / riff ready / 1–2 away badge — they're treated as best-effort, the way most home bartenders actually use them.

Riffs

What is a "riff," exactly?: A drink you started from another one and changed on purpose — a new ingredient, a different ratio, a swap. Riffed keeps the connection between the two: a riff shows a "Riff of the [original]" line wherever it appears, and the original drink lists every riff made from it under Roots.
Can other people riff my drinks?: Yes, once you publish one publicly or unlisted — that's the point of sharing a riff rather than keeping it a private draft. Their version keeps the lineage back to yours, the same way yours keeps it back to whatever you started from.

Your palate

How does Riffed learn what I like?: From what you actually do — the drinks you create, the ones you save, and the pours you log, each weighted by how much it says about your taste — plus two optional deliberate signals: a short taste quiz and a drink picker. Nothing is guessed from browsing alone.
A pour doesn't reflect my taste — can I fix that?: Yes. Exclude a single pour (the night was a fluke, not you) or exclude a whole drink (you don't actually want it speaking for your palate) from your palate page — either stays in your history, it just stops counting.

Events

What does "Share my palate" do when I RSVP to an event?: Turning it on lets the host's event page blend your taste into the group's shared chart, which drives what the app recommends for the party. It's per-event, and it starts on only if your profile is public. Leave it off and nothing of yours is shared — you can change it any time before or after you RSVP. Hosting? You get the same switch on your event's page, and it starts on.

Recipes & sourcing

Where do the recipes come from?: We rebuilt every classic from the ground up using reference sources — Wikipedia and Wikidata, the IBA’s official specs, and public-domain cocktail books like the Savoy Cocktail Book and Jerry Thomas’ guides. For modern classics that sit outside those references, we cross-check the build against multiple independent sources and use the version they agree on — not one bar’s house pour.
How do I know a recipe is accurate?: A recipe only ships if its build is corroborated across at least two independent sources, and then a separate fact-checking pass tries to disprove it before it’s accepted. Ratios and methods are facts we verify against the sources — we don’t take any single spec on faith.
Why do some drinks not name a creator?: We credit a creator only when the origin is genuinely documented — Sam Ross’s Penicillin, Audrey Saunders’s Little Italy. For drinks with disputed or convergent origins, like the Margarita, the Old Fashioned, or the Brooklyn, we leave the creator blank and lay out the competing claims in the drink’s origin story rather than crowning one legend as fact.
Are the descriptions and origin stories copied from somewhere?: No. Every tasting note and origin story is written fresh, in our own words. We’ll state a documented fact about a drink’s history, but we never lift wording from a source.
Why isn’t a drink I expected here?: If we couldn’t pin down a drink’s real recipe — sources flatly disagreed, or no measured spec exists — we left it out rather than invent one. We’d rather be missing a drink than ship a fabricated one. The library keeps growing as drinks clear that bar.
How is a drink's flavor chart calculated?: From the same ingredient data and recipe, arithmetically — pour size, each ingredient's role, and technique all feed the same 21-dimension chart a drink shows everywhere in the app. Nothing about it is hand-tuned per drink.