The app helps you find drinks to make, keep track of what's on your shelf, and save the recipes you come back to. The book helps you understand why those drinks work in the first place.

The goal isn't to teach you 142 recipes. It's to teach you how cocktails work.

Most people learn cocktails one recipe at a time. They memorize an Old Fashioned, then a Manhattan, then a Negroni. Eventually the list gets long enough that everything starts to blur together.

Cocktails make a lot more sense when you understand the patterns underneath them.

Once you can see those patterns, recipes become easier to remember. More importantly, they become easier to change. You can make substitutions, create variations, and build drinks around the ingredients you already have.

That's what The Bar Book is about.

Volume I explains the app and the system behind it. Volume II explains the theory: cocktail families, flavor, balance, dilution, carbonation, and the ideas that connect one drink to another.

The app is where you practice. The book is where you learn why it works.

Start with the next chapter.