Decent Cocktails

Licence and credits

What you may reuse

Why we can publish these recipes

A recipe's ingredients and amounts are facts, and facts can't be copyrighted. The same goes for a drink's name, its glass and garnish, and who created it and when. The US Copyright Office says this directly: a "mere listing of ingredients" is not protected (Circular 33). Most other countries take the same view. What copyright does protect is the author's own writing: their stories, descriptions and instructions. We haven't reproduced any of that.

This isn't a copy of the books. We rebuilt every recipe as a series of weighed steps: each amount converted to grams, each step labelled (add, muddle, top, garnish), and every method rewritten in our own words. Then we added what the books don't have: alcohol, sugar and acid figures for every drink, comparisons with similar drinks, our own descriptions and drink pictures, and ways to browse by spirit, ingredient and glass. What remains from the books are the facts: drink names, ingredients, amounts, glass, garnish and creator credits. We don't claim to own those facts; nobody can copyright a fact.

We built this because these books are wonderful, and we wanted their drinks to be easy to weigh, compare and make. If you enjoy them, please buy the books. The stories and writing in them are worth having, and you won't find them here.

Some drink names are also trademarks (Sazerac®, for example). They belong to their owners and appear here only to identify the drinks.