Guide

Notebook, spreadsheet, Notion, or app? Organising your cocktail recipes, honestly

Every way people keep their cocktail recipes, what each is actually good at, and where each one quietly fails. From someone who has used all of them.

By Travis Rudisill · September 7, 2026

Every year, somebody posts the same question to r/cocktails: “How do you organize your recipes?” It’s been asked in 2017, 2018, 2019, twice in 2024, and again in 2025, and the answers are always the same list: a notebook, a notes app, a spreadsheet, a Notion template, one of the apps, and, from the most honest people, “a folder of screenshots that’s an absolute mess.”

The question keeps getting asked because none of those answers quite works. Here’s what each one is actually good at, where it fails, and the combination that most people who’ve stuck with the hobby end up with.

The screenshots folder

Everyone starts here, and it’s not a system; it’s the absence of one. You see a spec on Instagram or pause a YouTube video, screenshot it, and it goes into the camera roll with everything else.

Good at: capture. Zero friction. That’s why the folder wins by default over every other option: the moment of “I want to remember this” takes one second.

Fails at: everything after. You can’t search it, you can’t sort it, and you can’t find the Paper Plane spec three months later among photos of your dog. You also can’t edit it, so the tweak you made lives in your head and the screenshot stays wrong forever.

The honest position: the screenshots folder is a good inbox and a terrible archive. Whatever system you pick has to be fast enough to drain it.

A paper notebook

The romantic answer, and a genuinely good one for a specific job.

Good at: the bar top. A notebook open next to the shaker is faster than any phone, doesn’t lock, doesn’t get wet-finger-rejected, and forces you to write the spec in a format that survives. It’s also the best thinking tool: a page of crossed-out Manhattan ratios is a record of how you got to the one you like.

Fails at: search and versioning. “Which page was the Boulevardier on?” is a real problem at forty drinks. So is “after years of ruining and losing notebooks,” which is a phrase I’ve seen in those Reddit threads more than once. A notebook has no backup.

Cards instead of a notebook. Index cards fix half the notebook’s problems for free. They sort (alphabetically, by spirit, by whatever you like), they’re one-drink-per-card so versions stay separate, and you can lose one without losing the collection. They’re why this site exists. The blank cards and the spec card format are the whole system for the drinks you’ve settled on.

The notes app

Apple Notes, Google Keep, whatever came with the phone.

Good at: being there. It’s on your phone, it’s searchable-ish, it’s free, and typing a spec takes a minute.

Fails at: structure and separation. Recipes end up between grocery lists and to-do items. There are no fields, so “was that ¾ or ½?” is a re-read of a paragraph. There’s no scaling. And every tweak either overwrites the original or becomes a second note called “Old Fashioned 2” that you’ll never reconcile. The notes app is where recipes go to be technically saved.

A spreadsheet

The power-user move, and the one most people who’ve stuck with the hobby for a few years have tried.

Good at: sorting and filtering. One row per drink, columns for spirit, method, ingredients, source. Sort by base spirit. Filter for “shaken.” It answers “what can I make with rye” in a way nothing else on this list does short of an app. It scales a recipe if you build the formula.

Fails at: being read while making a drink. A spreadsheet on a phone is miserable at the bar, and a laptop on the bar is worse. Photos don’t fit. Entry friction is high enough that the screenshots folder keeps growing anyway. And versions are awkward: a second row for the tweak, or a notes column that becomes a paragraph.

Several people in those Reddit threads describe keeping “a screenshot of the spreadsheet on my phone,” which is the system admitting defeat.

Notion, Airtable, and templates

The spreadsheet with a nicer face and a mobile app.

Good at: looking like the solution. A Notion database with a gallery view of your drinks is genuinely pleasant, and if you already live in Notion it’s a fine choice. Relations (ingredient → drinks that use it) are possible and satisfying to build.

Fails at: the same entry friction as the spreadsheet, plus a mobile app that is slow to open, slow to search, and bad with wet hands. There’s also a pattern in the threads: people build an elaborate template, enjoy building it, and stop adding recipes after the first thirty. The system becomes the hobby.

If you go this way, keep it to one database with one row per drink and a plain-text ratio column. The templates with twelve linked databases are the ones that get abandoned.

A cocktail app

Here’s where I have to be careful, because I make one, and because the category has a specific problem.

Most cocktail apps are catalogs: a few hundred or a few thousand recipes somebody else wrote, with a “my bar” inventory feature so it can tell you what you can make tonight. That’s a real and useful thing. It is not the same thing as a place to keep your recipes, and the reviews of the big apps are where you find that out: the top complaints from paying users are about custom recipes that don’t stick, edits that don’t save, and no way to export what you entered. I’ve written those up, with links, in the app comparison.

The test for any app is simple: enter three of your own recipes, edit one, close the app, reopen it, and then find the export button. If any of those steps is hard, the app is a catalog with a notebook bolted on, and the notebook is not the part they maintain.

Good at (when it’s built for it): capture without retyping (from a photo, a paste, a link), search by ingredient, scaling, and versions. It’s the only option on this list that can drain the screenshots folder without you typing every one.

Fails at: existing forever. An app can die. The Highball app, which a lot of people still love, was last updated in 2018. Any app you trust with your recipes needs a visible exit: a file, in a format something else can read. That’s true of mine as well, which is why export isn’t a paid feature in it.

What actually works: two systems, one rule

Almost everyone who’s stuck with this for a few years ends up in the same place, whether they planned it or not:

• Paper for the keepers. The ten to twenty drinks you make constantly go on cards at the bar. They don’t change much, they need to be readable with wet hands, and paper is the fastest interface there is. Print them.
• Searchable for the rest. The long tail, the experiments, the thing you saw on Instagram: those go somewhere you can search and version. Spreadsheet, Notion, or an app that treats your recipes as the product. The important property isn’t which one; it’s that entry is fast enough that you actually use it instead of the screenshots folder.

And the one rule, whichever you choose: write the verdict. “Too sweet, try ½” is the sentence that turns a recipe into your recipe. Every system on this list can hold it. Almost nobody writes it down. Start.