Steve Hegenderfer

This started as a text file. Then it was a Google Doc, which is where most of these recipes still lived until fairly recently — in no particular order, with the occasional note to myself that made sense at the time.

The point of the Drink Book is that everything in it is something I actually made. Not aggregated, not scraped, not "50 Best Cocktails For Summer." If a drink is in here, I stood at a bar and made it, probably more than once, and wrote down what worked. Some of them are classics done straight. Some are classics I interfered with. A few are mine.

I'm not a bartender. I'm a person with an unreasonable amount of vermouth and strong feelings about ice. That distinction matters mostly because it means I'm going to tell you when something didn't work, which a recipe site trying to sell you a blender generally won't.

And the robot?

That's SteveBot. He's read everything in here, and when he reaches past it for general bar knowledge he says so, which makes him considerably more reliable than most things claiming to give you cocktail advice. Tell him what's on your shelf and he'll tell you what you can actually make.

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He has no hangovers, no opinions about your gin, and no ability to judge you. Two of those are true.

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