About this project

The problem

You're hosting. Friends are arriving. You want to serve cocktails that aren't embarrassing, but you also want to actually talk to your guests instead of shaking drinks all night.

The solution has existed for decades in professional bars: batch the cocktails ahead of time. But until recently, the math was either guesswork or required a bartender's intuition built over years. The freezer makes it even better — a properly batched, properly proofed cocktail stays perfectly pourable at -18°C, and pours straight from the bottle into a chilled glass with no ice melt.

What this site does

A free calculator that does the math for you:

• Pick a classic recipe — Negroni, Manhattan, Margarita, 10 more.
• Or build your own from a single-drink recipe.
• The calculator tells you exactly how much to pour off, what to add back, the resulting ABV, the freeze status, and how many drinks you'll get.
• No login. No paywall. No tracking — just the ad cookies disclosed in our privacy policy.

How we get the recipes right

The classic-recipe ratios on this site are adapted from Christopher Kimball's Milk Street freezer-cocktail technique, with quantities re-derived for each bottle size and rounded to clean quarter-ounce jigger increments. The ABV and final-volume calculations are computed from first principles — alcohol-by-volume of each ingredient, scaled by exact ml — so the numbers you see match what's actually in your bottle.

Where Milk Street's published numbers don't quite balance (a few of their recipes leave the bottle slightly under-filled), we surface the real final volume rather than pretending the bottle is full. Where a published recipe tasted off in our own testing — the Old Fashioned was originally drier than most home cooks expect — we adjusted with a note.

The principles we stand on

• 22%+ ABV keeps cocktails pourable at standard freezer temperatures (-18°C / 0°F).
• 0–25% added water replaces the dilution ice would normally provide. Spirit-forward stirred drinks need less; shaken citrus drinks need more.
• Fresh ingredients matter — vermouth oxidizes within weeks, citrus is brightest in the first 24–48 hours, and a tired vermouth ruins an otherwise perfect Negroni.
• Garnish at serve, never in the bottle. Olives, citrus peels, and cherries should be added in the glass.

Who built this

FreezerBatchCocktails is an independent project, built and maintained by a home cocktail enthusiast. Calculations were developed by reading Milk Street's published technique, the Death & Co. Cocktail Codex, and a decade-plus of conversations with working bartenders. Suggestions, corrections, and recipe requests are welcome — drop us a line at the address below.

What we're not

We're not affiliated with any liquor brand, importer, or distillery. We don't sell alcohol. We don't ship anything. The site is editorial: a calculator and a set of recipes. Affiliate links to bar tools and books are clearly disclosed.

Affiliate disclosure

Some links on this site are affiliate links to Amazon and other retailers. When you buy something through these links, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. Those commissions are how the calculator stays free. We only recommend products we'd use ourselves.

Editorial corrections

If you find a math error, a busted ratio, or anything that just doesn't taste right, please tell us. We update the data file directly and re-publish — every page on the site recalculates from the same source of truth, so a fix in one place fixes it everywhere.

Contact

Email [email protected]. We read everything; we reply to most things within a couple of days.