What Can I Make With the Alcohol I Have? Build a Finder

You’ve got a shelf of half-used bottles and one question: what can I actually make with this? Instead of hunting for a cocktail recipe finder by ingredients, you can build one that reads your bar.

Build your own in Auto

Plenty of apps promise “enter ingredients, get cocktail recipe” results. They’re fine, but they’re generic — full of drinks that call for a bottle you don’t own. Building your own takes a few minutes and fits exactly how you drink.

Here’s the shape of it:

Open Auto and describe what you want: a cocktail generator that looks at a photo of your spirits and suggests drinks you can make right now.
Tell it the rule that matters most — don’t suggest recipes that need spirits missing from the photo, but common mixers are fair game.
Snap a photo of your bottles.
Refine it. Change the layout, add favorites, tweak the color. It’s yours, so make it work the way your brain works.

That’s the whole point: it’s not a “best cocktail app” you settle for. It’s cocktail recipes based on what’s in your bar.

How someone built theirs

One Auto user built exactly this — they called it Mix Master — and their prompt history is a good blueprint.

They started by describing the core idea: photograph a bunch of spirits, get one to three cocktails, and never suggest a drink that needs a bottle that isn’t in the shot. Mixers and common kitchen ingredients were allowed.

Then came the real-world fixes. Photos weren’t returning results at first, so they iterated until it worked. They ditched the cramped expanding-recipe view for a full screen with ingredients up top and big, chunky step-by-step instructions you can read across the room while holding your drink.

Next, personalization: favorite a recipe, show favorites on the home screen, and add a search bar that filters by ingredient. They cut clutter — removed the title and count from the front page — and set the primary color to red.

A few sharp rules made it genuinely usable:

Never list ice as an ingredient.
Prefer real, classic cocktails over improvised “twists,” and don’t require every ingredient.
Keep titles clean — just the drink name, no parentheses.

The clever finish was a drinks cabinet: every bottle spotted in a photo gets saved to a running list. When it builds a recipe, the photo’s spirits are weighted heaviest, but anything in your cabinet is fair game too. That turns a one-off snapshot into a finder that learns your whole collection.

FAQ

Do I need to know how to code? No. You describe what you want in plain language, snap photos, and adjust as you go.

How is this better than a regular cocktail app? It only suggests what you can actually make, in the layout you prefer, with your favorites and your bar. No accounts, no scrolling past drinks you can’t build.

What if the first version isn’t quite right? That’s expected. Like the builder above, you refine it — fix results, change screens, add rules — until it fits how you want to use it.