My Bar
What your bar can make, and what to buy next
Tick what you have. See what you can make exactly as written, what a named swap makes possible, what you're one ingredient away from, and which single purchase opens up the most.
Tick what you have
Start with your bottles, then the fresh things in the fridge. Even three or four is enough to see what you can make, what you’re one ingredient away from, and which single purchase would open up the most.
How My Bar decides
Three kinds of match, never merged
- Exact match — every ingredient the recipe requires is on your shelf. A whole lime counts as lime juice, and a lemon as lemon juice and peel; the result says so.
- Substitution match — something you have stands in for something you don’t, and the recipe itself has written that swap up as keeping the drink. Each swap is named with what it changes. Cointreau-style triple sec, orange curaçao, rye and bourbon, Campari and Aperol, green and yellow Chartreuse are all different bottles here; a swap between them is only ever offered by name, and only where a recipe vouches for it.
- Structural neighbour — not a match. When you can’t make a drink, we point to one you can that is built the same way and shares its family or at least two ingredients. It is a different drink, and is labelled as one.
Strict and practical
Strict counts exact matches only, from what you ticked plus ice, water, salt and sugar. Practical also counts swaps a recipe has written up at moderate confidence or better without calling the result a different drink, and assumes you can make simple syrup from sugar. A swap we can only infer — two bottles from the same category, say — is shown but never counted, because “similar on paper” is how dry vermouth ends up in a Negroni.
How “buy next” is ranked
For each thing you don’t have, we add it to your shelf and count the drinks that become makeable. The score is 10 points per new drink, 4 per cocktail family you couldn’t reach before, 2 per distinct way of building a drink among the new ones, 1 per alcohol-free drink, and one per drink it lets you make as written instead of with a swap; minus 3 for something that has to be used within days, and 2 per new drink needing kit you’ve said you don’t have. No prices, no shops, no affiliate links.
Your shelf is saved in this browser only, and sent to our server as a list of catalogue ingredients just long enough to answer. It is not stored, logged, or put in a link. For a longer read on stocking a bar from scratch, see building a home bar; to search by a few ingredients without saving anything, use Discover.