I made this for you guys because I love you – the Batch Cocktail Calculator. Designed for both professional bartenders and folks who make drinks at home, this calculator takes your single-serving cocktail recipe and turns it into a batch of any size. This project kicked my ass a more than the Universal Syrup Calculator did, but in the end it works great and I hope it will be just as helpful to you as syrupmath.com is.
Here are the parameters I set for myself on this project:
1. It had to be a webapp and not a spreadsheet, since many people don’t feel as comfortable using spreadsheets as those of us who work with them every day do.
2. It needed to be a simple interface, and one that would work gracefully on a phone (most of us don’t love lugging our laptops into the kitchen, but we always have our phones on us)
3. It needed to be able to do Number of Servings *and* Total Volume, because sometimes you need the math to make 250 Mai Tais, but other times you need to make a 750 ml bottle of Dirty Martinis for the freezer door.
4. It had to be able to calculate dilution, of course.
5. It needed to spit out the results in a printer-friendly format, so that you can just grab that sheet of paper and run with it, because big type on physical paper is great to have when you’re batching.
6. It needed to be at a standalone website with a simple and memorable URL, so you wouldn’t need to remember how to spell my long German name in order to find it when you’re in a hurry.
Eventually, I came up with a system that i feel satisfies all of these requirements. I’m pretty happy with it and I hope you will be, too. If you have any suggestions for how I can make this piece of software serve you better, please let me know in the comments below!
Check it out at batchcalc.com!
How do I turn this into a gallon pitcher
– 6 ounces whipped cream vodka
-1 ounce strawberry syrup
-1 ounce lemon lime juice
-1 cup cherry sprite
What’s the easiest way to get a gallon? How many cups of each item ? Or what measurements do I need for a gallon sized pitcher
Go ahead and plug your recipe into the calculator, Sam. Then select “Scale by Total Volume”, then enter 1 and select “Gallons” and I’d probably recommend a dilution of 0% for your drink. When you hit “Calculate Batch” you’ll have your scaled recipe. Cheers!
As always, great stuff. I’ve been really into making and tinkering with cocktails the last few years. Quick question, for batching say the flannel shirt, I assume the 25 percent dilution makes sense – though I may add less, spot taste, and adjust as I find depending on the cider I may want more or less dilution. Does this seem right? Also, would you recommend adding citrus earlier or should I wait until nearer serving? Per usual, you rock. Side note, knowing you enjoy the Japanese cocktail if I recall correctly, you should check out the variations in “the way of the cocktail”. They are a blast. Cheers, from Chicago (by way of Philadelphia).
Hey John Paul! That’s exactly how I do it, especially when I’m working on a really large batch. I always recommend tasting the batch to adjust before adding dilution, and yeah I always add that dilution a little bit at a time just in case.
help!
300 p 6pm-10pm 2 cocktails only …cosmo, appletini
2 drinks per hour for most then dropping off with time…
but still 900 cocktails
got the recipes did the caluations (1350 oz of Vodka = 10.6 gals …. 1350ozs/128oz per gal convert to liters and it 40 liter!
pouring over ice no shaking so some dilution but still… the gallons needed for this cocktail seem very high… am i missing
something in my thinking???
thanks you!
If you entered your recipe correctly into the batch calculator I can assure you that the math is correct. 10 gallons of vodka for nearly a thousand people doesn’t sound crazy to me at all.
Dude!! As always you never disappoint!! This is a Fantastic Tool and Thank You for always supplying us with great options to better run our programs. Just curious is there a way to save the sheets once built to be to then adjust calculations? Cheers, Ray
My pleasure, Ray! And that functionality would have been too much to build in (would need usernames and passwords and all that) but eventually there will be a phone app with all of these functions and much more!
Wonderful app!
Jeffrey, it would be great if you could add “templates/blueprints” for the most popular cocktails, allowing us to use them as-is or modify the ingredients and ratios to our liking.
For example, there could be a button labeled “Old Fashioned” and when clicked, it would automatically fill in the ingredients in the calculator’s ingredient form.
Thank you!
I considered it but decided against it when I realized how many messages I would be receiving about how my recipes were “wrong”. There’s no shortage of recipes out there or on this site, feel free to plug them in manually!
Your tool has made my life more enjoyable ha! Thank you for making such a powerful tool!
My pleasure, Andrew!
This is a such a clever tool to keep our batched cocktails consistent in our restaurant. We will put it to good use. Thank you so much!
You’re so welcome! I’m glad it’s gonna be useful to you!
Love it, thank you!
Jeffrey, thanks so much for another great app.
One minor suggestion would be to consider including a note that for batching bitters (if included in the recipe) that the user may want to cut the amount used in the batch (half or quarter, etc. depending on batch size) given they don’t necessarily scale linearly without taking over. Or maybe a note to exclude the bitters and add to each individual drink at the time of service? Anyway, just a thought.
Hey everybody! A couple of people have asked me why I didn’t include the option to do batch calculations by weight (or, more accurately, mass) and wanted to share my reasoning here. Doing batches by mass is just better – it’s easier and more accurate. It’s actually how all of our prep recipes are done at the bar, and it’s been that way for years.
Here are the reasons why I didn’t implement mass into the BatchCalc.com:
1. In order to calculate liquids by mass you need to know their densities, because not all liquid have the same density. For instance, the density of 100-proof liquor is around 0.935 g/ml, but the density of 80-proof liquor is around 0.953 g/ml. That makes for a big difference when scaling up to really large batches. So you can’t just say “weight out 2.5 kilograms of bourbon” unless you know the density of that particular whiskey.
I have a good-sized list of densities on me that I’ve been adding to over the years, but it’s in no way comprehensive, I’m afraid.
2. As I mentioned in the post, it needs to be phone-friendly. That input group for each ingredient is already crowded on mobile and adding another field for mass would make it unusable in the mobile version.
3. Half of the audience for this calculator is for home users who just want to make a pitcher of margaritas for their barbecue, so I had to choose the least-confusing path for them. I think about measurements in volume and mass every day, but most people don’t . Adding mass in would just result in a lot of confusion from folks who are already intimidated by this stuff and I’d like this tool to be adopted by as many people as possible, rather than folding in a thousand features.
4. A big part of this calculation is for professionals who want to scale up their recipes to a specific sized container – a 10L barrel for aging, or a 5 gallon Cornelius keg for a draft system, say – and if you can’t calculate for that if you have a mixture of liquid and solid (dry) ingredients.
Anyway, I hope that clears up some of the confusion. Like I said, we do all of our long-standing recipes by mass at the bar, but any time we need to do a quick one-off for events we use this calculator and I can tell you that it works perfectly for the vast majority of our needs.
Totally rad. Thank you sir.
Cheers from France.
My pleasure.
This is genius, good Sir. Thank you for always sharing your knowledge with us. BTW I run a small bar program in upstate new York and we have already used this for our batch cocktails and it works perfectly. Love the print featire!
Thank you! It always makes me happy to hear that this stuff is being used in bars.