About the catalog, the app, and Jig. If yours isn't here, ask: [email protected]
All of our recipes can be traced back to a source you can check: the IBA list, the Savoy, Difford's, PUNCH, Death & Co., etc. Most recipe pages have the citation at the bottom. When sources disagree on ingredients, preparation, etc., we pick the version that has the strongest claim to being the verified drink, and we say which one we picked. Nothing in our library has been invented, averaged, or guessed.
You keep the ingredients in "My Bar" current, then the app checks every recipe against it (we assume you always have pantry staples like ice, salt, and sugar). If you have every required ingredient, the drink shows up as "makeable", and that's the list Jig recommends from. Optional ingredients and garnishes never block a drink from being "makeable".
We think it's important for a bar to be able to serve everyone. The non-alcoholic drinks in our library were designed with the same standard as everything else — they're built for balance and bitterness in their own right, not watered-down imitations. They've earned their spot on the menu, and our Open Bar feature always includes them.
Good question, especially since Jig uses an AI back-end (Anthropic's Claude). The difference comes from the information Bar Necessities is able to give the AI system before you type a word.
A general chatbot answers cocktail questions from memory, and its memory of cocktails and recipes is very shaky (pun intended). We tested this: while building our catalog we tried letting a model recall recipe sources from memory, and it was nearly always wrong, despite having high confidence in its answers. Every recipe in our catalog is verified against a real source. So Jig never answers from memory, it uses our cited library. All 255 sourced recipes are embedded in every conversation you have with Jig.
Unlike a general chatbot, Jig also knows every ingredient you have on-hand from your live "My Bar" inventory. The app determines which drinks you can actually make before Jig says anything, and Jig never does its own ingredient math.
Taste preferences are also a differentiator. Chatbot "memories" are ungrouped and inconsistently applied. Conversely, we build a detailed preference model that aggregates feedback from your chats, your ratings, and your tasting notes — and we share it with you. Open "Your Taste" in the Settings section of the app and you'll see every preference we've recorded, how confident we are about it, and a way to correct or delete any of them. Jig sees this profile before saying anything.
Lastly, a chat window is where a chatbot ends. Jig is fully integrated into the rest of the app: your favorites and tasting history, identifying the one ingredient that would unlock the most new drinks from Bar Builder, creating a beautiful Cocktail Menu you can share, and Open Bar's live link for guests.
Of course, like any bartender, Jig can still be wrong. But it can't misremember a recipe, because it isn't just remembering. It's reading cited facts.
Because the app is the customized side of Bar Necessities: our AI bartender Jig greets you, the app stores your personalized list of ingredients and your unique taste profile, and Open Bar publishes your list of makeable drinks. Each of those requires an account to work. We use "Sign in with Apple" because it's simple: no password; no email beyond Apple's relay. If you just want the reference information with no account, this site contains the full catalog for free and with no sign-in required.
The catalog, My Bar, Bar Builder, Cocktail Menu, Open Bar, and cocktail ratings are all free. The in-app subscription just raises your message limit with Jig from 10 per month to 30 per day. That's the entire difference.
Open Bar creates a live link showing what drinks you can make right now. Guests open it in any web browser (no app or account needed) and the menu updates as you mark bottles in or out. Full story on the Open Bar page.
We actually might. A surprising amount of what you see trending on social media is a canonical drink dressed up with a new name: a sour with a different syrup, a spritz with a different bitter, a Margarita in disguise. Our catalog groups these families together (Margarita, Tommy's Margarita, Mezcal Margarita…), so before you decide a drink is missing, search for the base spirit and check the ingredients rather than just the name.
But sometimes we genuinely don't have it, and that's by design. The Bar Necessities catalog is carefully curated, not scraped. A drink earns its place in our library by belonging to the working canon (the drinks a good bartender is expected to know) and by being traceable to a source we can check: the IBA list, the Savoy, Difford's, PUNCH, Death & Co., etc. We have no invented drinks, no approximations, and nothing we can't source.
With that said, the catalog does grow over time. When a new drink proves it's more than just a short-term trend, it gets the same treatment as the other 255 — sourced, checked, and added accurately and with citations. If you think we're missing one that belongs, email us at [email protected].