Questions, answered.

The short version of how Riffed treats its recipes — where they come from, how they’re checked, and where we draw the line.

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 tell the story in the description rather than crowning one legend as fact.

Are the descriptions copied from somewhere?

No. Every description 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.