It's at cocktails.charlessieg.com. There are 46 recipes so far. There's no account to create, and nobody paid to be on it: no ads, no sponsors, and no affiliate links.
It went live on a Sunday afternoon with 45 drinks. By lunch on Monday it had 46, a page about bitters, a blog of twelve articles on where the drinks came from, and a page for each of ten New Orleans bars. Claude Code built it.
My Recipes, My Words
The one rule I set at the start: the recipes are mine, in my words. The amounts, the brands, and the asides came straight off my own list, and they stayed. So the three-equal-parts Vesper still says "Shaken like a motherfucker." The Carajillo still gives away the secret: "shake the shit out of the Licor 43 and the espresso to build a froth on top." And the Vilnius Mule still insists that the vodka has to be Russian and poured straight from the freezer, with a note that Vilnius is the hometown of Hannibal Lecter. Or of Marko Ramius, captain of the Red October.
Anything written for me only describes the drink. It never makes up a preference or a history I didn't give it, and where my list was thin, the site says so. Three drinks carry working names. The Heat Index was "Margarita with Heat," which needed a better name. The Coral Collins was just "aperol gin drink." The Caramel Apple Cider Martini came with no name at all. And I never wrote down amounts for the Hugo Spritz, so that page follows Difford's Guide's recipe and credits it.
Every Drink in Its Proper Glass
Every recipe has a picture of the drink in the glass it belongs in: a coupe, a rocks glass, a flute, a copper mug. None of them is a photograph. They were generated with Flux 2 Pro, all in one style, a lake house bar after dark with a walnut bar top, amber lamplight, and the last blue light on the water. That way the index reads like one book instead of 46 stock photos. All 101 renders it took, re-rolls included, cost about $7.58 by the build's own estimate.
It took some learning. An image model will letter a bottle the moment you give it an excuse, so every bottle is described as plain and unlabeled. And a copper mule mug comes back see-through unless you say it's solid metal.
A garnish gets the same treatment. The French 75's picture was asked for a Luxardo cherry, and it came back with LUXARDO lettered across the cherry. It sat on the site for four days before it was caught. That picture has been redone, and every generated picture now gets read for words before it ships.
The site's signature is the pour diagram. Each drink is drawn as its glass, filled from the bottom with a band for each ingredient, as tall as that ingredient's share of the drink and in its own color. A Paper Airplane is four equal stripes in a coupe, so you can see what a drink is before you read a word.
A Calculator That Does No Math in Your Browser
Each recipe has a row of buttons: one to four drinks, a 28 oz shaker, or a half gallon, in ounces or milliliters. The shaker button is 28 oz because that's what my Elevated Craft Hybrid shaker holds, and a half gallon is the max-fill line on a Ninja SLUSHi. Press the shaker button on the Paper Airplane, and its ¾ oz parts become 7 oz from each bottle, about nine drinks.
A batch fills the vessel with the still ingredients only. Anything sparkling goes in each glass when you serve, because a shaker full of Champagne would go flat or blow the lid off. So a shaker of French 75 is 17 oz of gin, 5½ oz of lemon juice, and 5½ oz of syrup, which makes about eleven drinks. The Champagne is marked "At serving": about 3 oz in each glass, 33½ oz in all.
None of that arithmetic happens on the page. Every amount for every button, in both unit systems, is worked out in Python when the site is built, along with how to say it: quarter ounces under a pint, half ounces with cups beside them above that, teaspoons for anything under a quarter ounce, and milliliters rounded to the marks on a jigger. The page's script only swaps in text that was already written. That means the math has unit tests, and a rounding mistake gets caught before the site ships instead of at the bar.
What to Stock
The Bar is the shopping list. To make all 46 drinks, you keep 75 things around, from 17 spirits down to the egg whites and the cinnamon. Each one lists the bottles I use and every drink that calls for it. Gin is in 16 of them.
It's also a checklist. Check off what you have, and it counts the drinks you can make and lists the ones that are one item away, naming the item. With 22 fairly ordinary things checked, it says 15 of 46 are ready and 10 more are one item away: the Aperol Spritz needs prosecco, and the Rosemary Gin Fizz needs rosemary.
The first version had a bug that I found by using it. No matter what I checked, it said I could make 0 of 45. The cause was homemade syrup: honey syrup was its own checkbox, so having honey didn't count. Now a syrup you make yourself is covered by what it's made from. Honey covers honey syrup, and sugar covers simple syrup.
Around the checklist are nine pages that sort the drinks by what's in them, from gin to bubbles; Barware, with the shaker, the slush machine, the tools, and the glassware; and Bitters, with the six bottles behind the drinks.
Where the Drinks Came From
The blog covers where the drinks came from and the bars worth the trip. Eight articles are on New Orleans originals: the Sazerac, the Ramos Gin Fizz, the Vieux Carré, the Hurricane, the Grasshopper, the Brandy Crusta, the Absinthe Frappé, and the Cocktail à la Louisiane. Four more cover the off-menu Verbena at the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, Death & Co in New York, Prohibition and the Napoleon House, and the best cocktail bars in New Orleans. Each of the ten bars on that list has its own page.
Every fact in an article links to where it came from, and every article ends with its sources. Each name, number, and quote was checked against the page it cites, and a test fails on any link the research didn't record. Where the sources are thin, the article says so. The Carousel Bar page says of the Vieux Carré's origin story, "Treat the date and name with some care," because every account it found traces back to the hotel.
The bar pages follow the opposite rule from the recipe pages. A generated picture of a real, named bar would be a fake picture of the place, so those pages use real photographs from Wikimedia Commons, each printed with its author and license.
The photograph in that screenshot is the carousel's canopy by vxla, cropped, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
How It Was Built
Claude Code did the building. My part was the list of recipes, a few rules (my words stay, 28 oz for the shaker, Russian vodka in the mule), bug reports, and the answers only I could give. The Corpse Reviver #4 on my list came from "the Empire Bar," and I got asked which one. It's the one at Broussard's.
The agents turned the list into data, one small file per drink plus files for the ingredients, the glasses, and the spirits. They wrote the generator that turns that data into pages, drew the glasses, generated the drink pictures and re-rolled the ones that came out wrong, researched and fact-checked the articles, and found and credited the bar photographs.
Nothing ships on vibes here either. Every commit runs the unit suites, the calculator's math among them, and fails if a generated page is out of date. Before a release, a real-browser suite loads all 84 pages in light and dark mode, on a desktop and at phone width. It fails on a console error, a missing image, a sideways scroll on the phone, or a serious accessibility finding from axe. Then it presses the calculator's buttons, filters and searches the home page, and checks off The Bar to make sure the count moves.
If you only make one, start where the home page does, with the Paper Airplane: equal parts bourbon, amaro, Aperol, and lemon juice, shaken and served up.
Brand names in this post belong to their owners and appear only to say what goes in the glass. Please drink responsibly, and never drink and drive.