The Cocktail Computer Is The Home Bartender’s Best Friend
Photo via Cocktail Computer
Lily Szajnberg didn’t set out to invent the home bartender’s best friend. She simply got tired of hunting for recipes only to find she didn’t have the ingredients necessary to concoct her drink of choice for the evening. They say necessity is the mother of invention, and the baby that Szajnberg’s need for a drink produced is the Cocktail Computer, a beautifully designed, mid-century inspired recipe search engine.
In 2012, Szajnberg, a cocktail enthusiast and self-proclaimed defunct technology nerd, decided to take on the yearlong challenge of making one new cocktail a day. It seemed easy enough with the endless possibilities from searching the internet and her growing library of booze books to reference. But Szajnberg realized within a few weeks Googling ingredients was resulting in hundreds of entries, and combing through cocktail books was a laborious task. Can’t a girl just get a drink?
Szajnberg, a web products developer for MTV with a background in design and technology, decided it was time to curate a list of 24 essential cocktail ingredients to make the job of concocting drinks at home easier. She polled top bartenders and consulted her personal list of over 350 spirits, modifiers and garnishes from the cocktails she had sipped over two years to come up with the final list of 24 key ingredients and their drinks. Now it was time to compile all of this boozy knowledge into a neat, tidy and searchable package.
“I had come across an old contraption that used punch cards. I thought, what if I used punch cards to make searching for cocktail recipes easier,” Szajnberg says of the ah-ha moment which lead to the computer’s creation. “Punch cards are the original concept of filtering back information. This technology was essentially the first search engine.”