About us
The short
Make Me a Cocktail is the world’s best cocktail resource, with over 3000 amazing recipes, hundreds of user curated lists and a growing community of cocktail-making enthusiasts from around the world.
It was founded in 2010 when cocktail enthusiast and software developer Nick Wilkins (aka me) became fed up browsing the web, trying to find decent cocktail recipes and 99% of the time finding ones he couldn't.
Over the next two months, I built a beta website from scratch, taking ideas from cocktail-loving friends and coming up with the pioneering My Bar feature. Make Me a Cocktail was born.
The site has grown ever since, undergoing several redesigns but always doing what it set out to do all those years ago — to help people have fun while making the best cocktails they can.
The long
The early years
Make Me a Cocktail was set-up and envisioned in late 2010 when after much internet searching and cocktail mixing, Nick Wilkins (aka me), got "royally frustrated" about the online options to find cocktails and share them with the world.
At home in a dark corner I had been collecting various spirits and liqueurs and wanted to explore what cocktails I could make. "Why, there must be somewhere where I can just put the ingredients I have into a database, and it will tell me what I can make?" he thought. Unfortunately, he was wrong. After much searching I found only 3–4 websites that offered the service, and none of them seemed to offer the level or simplicity that I was after.
Two weeks later I wrote a fairly simple script that could do just what I was after, and I was content as I used the script to make cocktails for friends and family alike.
During the Christmas period of 2010, I decided to turn the script into the basis of a much more comprehensive website that offered a full cocktail experience. Over the next two months, with the help of many cocktail loving associates, people in the cocktail industry, and some amazing thoughts, recommendations, and pure data entry from many close friends, a time of foundation setting and growth was carried out, as the base information and ideas were gathered for the site. Finally in March 2011 Make Me a Cocktail was born.
The site grew and prospered over the next 18 months, and as users started to (as their namesake suggests) use the site, create their own bars and update their profiles the site boomed. More features were added, a community was born, and it was time for a redesign.
The middle ages
During early 2012 an overhaul of the site started, re-writing the whole backend and having a completely new front-end design in place. It took months of coding, tweaking and overtime hours as I wanted to create the best possible site I could with the day's technology. In July 2012 - Make Me a Cocktail 2.0 was released to the public.
3 years later and 2015 was firmly in its summer clothes. Mobile usage on the site had risen to over 70% of the users, new features and information had been added, functionality had been tweaked and the site was slowly starting to creak at the seams. Now and again strange blips appeared in the results and something had to be done. Another website overhaul began, again re-writing the core code base from the ground up. Responsive layouts, completely new power features and core functionality were added, stripped, re-wrote and tweaked to create what I believed was the best cocktail website out there.
The future
COVID hit the world, and with it the use of Make Me a Cocktail shot through the roof. By 2023 it was obvious that the site, although working, scalable and offering a host of features, needed a re-write to utilise all the future technologies and developments; the old code base was holding me back.
A completely fresh look, a completely new codebase, and a complete overhaul of every single micro-interaction and cocktail on the site was done. In early December of 2023 Make Me a Cocktail v5.0 was launched, and it's what you see in-front of you today.
From the early concept of a My Bar feature on my machine at home, to a community-driven site with over 3000 cocktails and counting, most people would be happy at where the site is and leave it to sit and help people make the best cocktails the world over. However, not happy at sitting on my laurels, I'm always wanting to push the boundaries both technically and practically to try and deliver the most cutting edge, most useful, most stupenduous cocktail resource around.
That ladies and gentlemen - was, is, and hopefully always will be, Make Me a Cocktail.
Interested in reading more, and see what we've been up to recently? Check out our changelog for a more granular listing.
