About Us

Easily organize and find craft cocktail recipes — your own and others’.

Life’s too short to drink the same old thing. Discover new and intriguing cocktails, just as you do with food, wine, art and other life-long pleasures.

When Dan first ventured beyond Martinis and Manhattans, the flavor world opened. Everywhere he went, and everything he read, had tantalizing cocktails. Recipe slips floated about his house. Messy. He put them on 3x5 index cards. Awkward. He typed them into a document. That grew. And grew into a dozen pages of ideas, experiments, winners, and notes all jumbled together.

He needed a database. Out came FileMaker and in went 50 recipes, then 50 more, then 50 more. It worked. But he couldn’t share recipes with friends. He only had access at the computer. And FileMaker couldn't handle some of the idiosyncrasies of cocktails. He needed a specialized tool.

The internet scoured. Nothing. Forums queried. Nada.

Kindred Cocktails is the pursuit of the ideal cocktail recipe database. Flexibly accessed. Focused on craft cocktails. Attuned to the idiosyncrasies of cocktail making. And the nexus of like-minded — kindred — cocktail lovers.

So if you share our love of high-quality cocktails and you:

  • are just beginning to explore the craft cocktail world, looking for lots of quality cocktails,
  • are a dedicated cocktail enthusiast with an existing collection of cocktails, or
  • are a cocktail professional looking for inspiration and a strong organizational tool,

Kindred Cocktails makes collecting and using recipes a joy.

Dan Chadwick, Chief Swizzlestick

dan

Dan’s a software guy. He built a homebrew computer as a teenager, using kits, scavenged chips and surplus parts. Computer degree from Brown. Stint at Wang Labs. He created FileMaker, the best-selling database for the Apple Macintosh®. Co-founded Attain Corp, which made IN CONTROL®, a personal and group to-do list manager.

After Attain, he pursued a different passion by joining Goodwin’s High End, an ultra-high-performance audio and home theater store. Years later, he returned to his first and truest love, software. Today he works full time for Kindred Cocktails and select web clients.

Dan’s other passions include driving and racing. He instructs for several car clubs, teaching high performance driving at race tracks in the Northeast. He is also a member of a race team which campaigns motor-swapped E30 race car in day-long endurance races. Is the the creator of Driving Evals, which facilitates high-performance driving school evaluations and is co-inventor of the Skill Level Instruction Program.

Dan walks his beloved labrador retriever every day, throwing the ball and washing the mud off her.

In cocktails, Dan has a taste for the complex, challenging, and at times, well, vile. He loves amari, the bitter liqueurs from Italy and beyond. He toys with flavor combinations, seeks the unusual, and twists classics. He also likes a well-made Martini (gin, of course), an Islay scotch neat or a cold beer.

Zachary Pearson, Editor

zachary

It all started out so innocently... Zachary was a Shiner Bock drinker in Houston in the summer of 2000 and his soon-to-be-wife gave him THE LOOK and asked if there was going to be wine at the wedding. He spent a few months reading up about wine and eventually pestered the local liquor store enough that they hired him (in retrospect mostly to shut him up). So he's spent the majority of twenty years now learning about wine. While he was studying for a professional certification in 2009, some of the people in his study group started talking about a new bar dedicated to serving great cocktails. He was intrigued and stopped by one day. This led to a hurried conversation and a copy of THE LIST which he still has a copy of. By today's standards it's quaint, but in 2009, you couldn't buy a bottle of Rittenhouse 100 or Carpano Antica in Houston, so when he waltzed into the liquor buyer's office and handed it to him, he didn't really understand what he was in for. If you ever end up in this bar, ask for a glass of Luxardo's Perla Dry and tell them Zachary sent you.

But that was ten years ago. Today, he can see Portland from his balcony. When he's not wrangling two kids under the age of four, he tries to sleep, and failing that read things, preferably with a drink in hand. He's in the midst of Nose Dive by Harold McGee, which is fascinating. Other recent things he likes are the LBJ biography by Robert Caro, Neal Stephenson's Anathem, and Richard Power's The Overstory. He still loves weird things to drink too - brandies of all types, offbeat amari, and r(h)ums of all types and colors. He likes cocktails that synthesize aromas and flavors that make him stop and think.

Craig Eliason, Curator

craig

As a professor of art history, Craig enjoys the analytic evaluation and the attention to aesthetics demanded by cocktail crafting. When it comes to mixology, he is an amateur, but stresses the Latin etymology of that label: “done for the love of it.” His Instagram account often features cocktails he invented or found on Kindred Cocktails.

In addition to assisting with curation of the Kindred Cocktails database, Craig contributed its logotype. He based the design on the intertitles of the classic Surrealist silent film “Un Chien Andalou” (1929), linking his passions for modern art, typeface design, and mixology.

There aren’t really any genres of mixed drinks that he doesn’t like, though his taste leans towards the strong and stirred, and he admires recipes that pit particularly intense flavors against each other successfully. He also likes experimenting with DIY ingredients, like making a piney syrup out of the needles from the spruce tree in his front yard.

When he’s not drinking cocktails, Craig enjoys designing fonts and curling. But truth be told, he enjoys doing those things while drinking cocktails too.

Leslie Craven, Curator

Leslie blames his son.

Said son, aged perhaps 18 (he's now nearer to 40 than 30), decided on leaving high school to pause his traditional education while considering what he wanted to do. During this period he embarked on a bar course and, not unreasonably, requested that his parents provide practice material for the cocktail portion. His parents obliged with some basics, and quickly came to appreciate the charms of coming home from work to be greeted at the door by their son, towel over one arm and bearing a tray with the evening's libation.

Fast forward several years (the son never pursued the barman path through life, alas) and Leslie's collection of interesting cocktail ingredients now surpasses that of many bars. To supplement this, he makes his own gin, absinthe, nocino, bitters and various other concoctions, home distilling being entirely legal in New Zealand where he lives.

He describes himself as an enthusiastic, if untutored, cocktail amateur. His preferences run to the boozy and bitter, and he has a distinct aversion to any recipe calling for citrus juice, much to the despair of his Kindred colleagues.

Our business

Kindred Cocktails derives revenue from sponsorship. A user account is free — now and probably forever.

And relax, Kindred Cocktails does not sell its user database to third parties.