About and FAQs

The recipes on this website are from The Savoy Cocktail Book, published in 1930. The book contains 750 cocktail recipes compiled by Harry Craddock, an influential barman and then head of the famous American Bar at the Savoy Hotel, London. The book is considered a classic of cocktail culture, and has remained in print since it was first published.

The original 1930 edition of the book has been made available as a digital copy by the EUVS library. It is a beautiful artifact of 1920s and 1930s mixology and of Art Deco design, with illustrations by Gilbert Rumbold.

However, the digital edition is not readily searchable. This site enables the reader to easily search cocktails by name, and more importantly to filter for cocktails based on their ingredients. We've tried to preserve some of the style of the original, and for each recipe you will also find the page number for the cocktail in the original book.

This website was created by Jamie Elsey, a London-based data scientist, data visualization specialist, and lover of good cocktails.

There are many delicious cocktails in the book, and your mileage may vary. That being said, if you don't know where to start, some great drinks include: the Sidecar (a brandy-based cousin of the Margarita and the White Lady - the latter of which is credited to Harry Craddock), Corpse Reviver #2 (a refreshing gin-based cocktail also credited to Craddock), and Satan's Whiskers (which happens to be the name of another great London cocktail bar)

For most recipes in the cocktail book, measurements take the form of simple fractions as opposed to specific measurement amounts. The idea is that the drinks can be sized up or down according to preference or the number of people you are making the drink for. For a single drink, it would be reasonable to use 25-30ml (about 1 fluid ounce) per quarter.

Cocktail includes: Use this to filter for cocktails containing specific ingredients. With the toggle set to 'OR', cocktails containing any of the ingredients you selected will be filtered for. With the toggle set to 'AND', cocktails with the specific combination of ingredients you select will be filtered for.

Cocktail does not include: Use this to filter out cocktails that contain certain ingredients. With the toggle set to 'OR', cocktails containing any of the ingredients you selected will be removed from the recipe list. With the toggle set to 'AND', cocktails with the specific combination of ingredients you select will be removed.

Cocktail only includes: Use this to filter for cocktails that can be made using only the ingredients that you specify - so you can work out what cocktails can be made on the basis of what you have. The filtering is not absolute - some ingredients that are very easily available but which you might not think to specify (e.g., water) will not be filtered out, and several ingredients that are quite infrequent in the cocktail book are also not filtered out so as to keep the list of ingredients more manageable.

Several cocktails include reference to different options. The Savoy Cocktail book notes that some ingredients can be used interchangeably (for example, lime juice can often be used instead of lemon juice, or Calvados instead of Applejack). Interchangeable ingredients are shown on the recipe cards as something like 'option a1' or 'option a2'. This indicates that either one of these ingredients can be used. Some cocktails contain more than one set of interchangeable ingredients, in which case the next interchangeable pair will use a different letter (e.g., options b1 and b2).