Where the flavor data comes from

Every chart in Riffed is arithmetic over things you can see — no vibes, no black box. Here's the pipeline in plain terms.

The recipes

The classics in Riffed were rebuilt from the ground up against reference sources: Wikipedia and Wikidata, the IBA's official specs, and public-domain cocktail books like the Savoy Cocktail Book and Jerry Thomas' guides. Modern classics the public domain doesn't carry — a Gin Gin Mule, a Red Hook — are built from the consensus of several independent published sources instead, never one bar's house pour. Either way a recipe only ships when 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. When sources flatly disagreed, or no measured spec exists, we left the drink out rather than invent one.

Attribution follows the same rule: a creator is named only when the origin is genuinely documented (Sam Ross's Penicillin, Audrey Saunders's Little Italy). Disputed origins stay disputed — the story goes in the description, and nobody gets crowned by guesswork. Every description is written fresh, in our own words. You can check the receipts yourself: tap Sources on any drink's detail page.

The ingredients

Each ingredient in the catalog — every spirit, syrup, juice, and bitters — carries its own profile across the 21 flavor dimensions. We used AI to do the heavy reading: distilling how each ingredient is described across reference material into scores, then calibrating the results against the whole catalog so the scales stay consistent — so "bitter" means the same thing for Campari as it does for coffee liqueur.

From ingredients to a drink

A drink's chart is the weighted blend of its ingredients' profiles, and the weighting tries to match how drinks actually taste:

• Bigger pours count more — but not linearly. The third ounce of gin changes a drink less than the first did, and the math follows that curve.
• Role matters. A dash of bitters punches far above its volume in the glass, and it's weighted accordingly — a quarter teaspoon of Angostura is not treated like a quarter teaspoon of water.
• Technique counts. Shaking, stirring, blending, and your ice all nudge dilution, temperature, and texture, and the chart reflects the drink as served, not as bottled.

Your riffs go through exactly the same math — computed instantly, on your device, as you edit. That's what makes the live chart in the riff editor honest: it isn't a preview of an estimate, it's the same calculation every other drink gets.

What we don't do

We don't invent specs, we don't copy prose, and we don't crown legends as facts. If a number is on a chart, there's a chain behind it you can follow: sources → recipe → ingredients → arithmetic.