About eXir

A drinks encyclopedia where every figure is computed rather than typed, built and kept in the open by one person. Free, ad-free, login-free and cookie-free.

Who made this

Kiarash Farajzadehahary

Scientist · developer · designer

I kept doing the same arithmetic on the back of an envelope — how strong is this once the ice has done its work, how much water does a batch of twelve need, how much of that bottle am I actually going to use. eXir is what I wanted instead: one page per drink that does its own sums and cannot contradict itself. I build it in the open, on my own time, and I would genuinely like to hear when something here is wrong.

Contact

Personal sitekiarashfa.github.io
Emailkiarashfa@gmail.com
GitHubgithub.com/kiarashfa

Support

eXir is free, ad-free and login-free, and stays that way — if it saved you a round, you can put something toward the next hundred drinks.

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Where it stands

Drinks7

Ingredients26

Preparations10

Glasses8

Counted from the published content at build time. The catalogue is being written; what is here is written rather than generated, and each page's figures are checked by the same build that publishes it.

No number here is typed by hand

Every quantity, dilution, final volume, strength, standard-drink figure, sugar figure and energy figure on this site is computed from structured data. Amounts are authored in millilitres and grams; ounces, temperatures in Fahrenheit, counts of dashes and limes, and every total are display layers worked out at the moment you read them.

That means a page cannot contradict itself. Change the drink count, the service mode or the units, and the arithmetic follows — including the water that shaking or stirring adds, which is an ingredient in a batched drink and an accident in an unbatched one.

For a food site that discipline is a purity principle. For a drinks site it is the product, because the arithmetic is the craft: dilution, batching, strength and brew ratio are calculations working bartenders do constantly and home drinkers get wrong.

What is measured, what is modelled

A figure taken from a dataset or a producer's own label is stated. A figure that comes out of a model is marked with a dotted underline and a tilde, and that marker means one thing everywhere on the site: the true value is not on this page.

Dilution is the main one. How much water a drink takes on from ice is modelled, not measured, and every figure descending from it — the final volume, the strength, the sugar per litre — is marked accordingly. The fraction is always a fraction of the poured volumebefore any ice, and the site says so wherever it appears, because published figures disagree with one another on precisely that point.

Bitterness is the other. There is no bitterness figure on any bottle and no unit for it, so it is an editorial judgement, and it is drawn differently from the three bars beside it for exactly that reason. Difficulty is the same kind of thing.

Where the figures come from

Composition data comes from the United States Department of Agriculture's FoodData Central, which is public domain, from producers' own published figures where a product is proprietary and nothing else carries it, and from Open Food Facts for branded products neither covers. Every Form on every ingredient page names its source, and the whole list with its licences is on the sources page.

Nothing computed is ever imported. A third party's arithmetic for a finished drink's strength or calories would undo the only thing that makes this site worth building.

Photography comes from Wikimedia Commons, curated by hand and credited on each image itself — the small “i” opens the file, the author, the licence and what was done to it. Cropping and grading makes a derivative work, which is why that record travels with the picture rather than living in an index.

On alcohol

Roughly half of what eXir documents contains alcohol, and the site states how much — in grams of pure alcohol, and in the standard-drink measures used in the United States and the United Kingdom. Those figures are here because a drink's strength is a fact about the drink, and a reference work that computes everything else while staying quiet about that one would be making a choice.

They are calculations, not measurements. Each is derived from the stated strength of the bottles a recipe names, adjusted for the water the method adds. A different bottle, a longer stir, or a heavier pour changes the answer, and the site marks every figure that descends from an estimate.

eXir does not recommend drinking, does not suggest quantities, and holds no view on what anyone's limit should be. Guidance on that comes from health authorities in your own country, who publish it freely and revise it as the evidence changes. Legal drinking ages differ too, and the site assumes nothing about where you are. Every drink here that can be made without alcohol says so, and a large part of the catalogue never contained any.

If alcohol is causing harm to you or to someone close to you, help exists and it is local. National health services and support organisations in your own country are the place to start.

What it keeps, and where

There is no backend, no account and nothing to sign in to. Whatever the site remembers — your shelf in My Bar, yourplan, your units, your theme — stays in your own browser and never leaves it. That also means it lives in one browser on one device, and the site cannot move it for you.