← All guides

Your bar & what you can make

A recipe app that ignores what you actually own is a wishlist. Tell Riffed what's on your shelves and every drink in the catalog gets scored against them — so "what can I make tonight?" has a real answer.

Stocking it

Your bar lives on your profile. Add bottles by searching or browsing the catalog — or point the camera at your shelf and let the scanner read the labels. You can go as general ("gin", "sweet vermouth") or as specific (the exact bottle) as you like; both work, for reasons below.

The three badges

Every drink is scored against your bar into one of three tiers:

  • Make now — You have everything. Pour away.

  • Riff ready — One sensible substitution away — a bottle you own can cover the gap.

  • 1–2 away — One bottle short (two on bigger builds), with nothing on your shelf close enough to stand in.

The three badges as they appear on drink cards — icon-only in the app, so consider this the legend.

The middle tier is the interesting one: its badge carries the riff icon because that substitution is a riff — tap through and the app shows you which of your bottles covers the gap.

Two rules with opinions behind them:

  • Garnishes never gate what you can make. A missing orange peel should not hide a Negroni from you. Garnishes are best-effort at home, and the badges treat them that way.
  • The specific covers the general. A recipe that calls for "gin" is Ready if you own Tanqueray — owning a particular bottle of exactly what's asked always counts. (It doesn't work loosely in reverse: sloe gin is not gin, and the scoring knows it.)

Where you see it

The Bar screen is the exhaustive view: the three counts — make now, riff ready, 1–2 away — over a bar proportioned the same way, then your inventory, then every drink listed by tier. Search has a "From your bar" toggle that narrows results to what your bar supports, and Home keeps it curated: badges ride every card, and the "From your bar" row leads with what you can actually pour.

The Bar screen: the make now, riff ready and 1–2 away counts over a stacked bar, above the category-grouped inventory.

The Bar screen

The Bar screen's "Add one bottle" section: each suggested bottle with how many new drinks it unlocks and how many land in your wheelhouse, above the drinks you can already make.

Add one bottle

Left: the Bar screen's tier counts and category-grouped inventory. Right: further down the same screen — one bottle at a time, ranked by how many drinks it unlocks.

Add one bottle

Scroll past your inventory and the Bar screen answers the standing question at the liquor store: "Add one bottle" ranks bottles by how many new drinks each one unlocks from where you stand today, and notes how many of those also land "in your wheelhouse" — a match for your palate, not just your shelf. (If you want garnishes suggested too — the "this completes three drinks" kind — there's a Garnishes switch right on that section; it never touches the badges.)

You can also point the badges at someone else's shelves: browse a friend's bar or a shared bar and every badge re-scores against theirs.