About Soda Vault
Who writes this, and why a recipe catalog needed building in the first place.
Soda Vault is a cocktail recipe app: 16,000 recipes, free to read, on the web and on iOS and Android. Tell it which bottles you own and it filters the catalog down to the drinks you can actually pour tonight.
Who I am
I am Vlad Bors, a computer engineer in British Columbia. I built the app, the API behind it and this website, and I write everything in the Learn section. There is no content team here and no freelance byline: if a page says a Manhattan is stirred for 25 seconds, it is because that is what I do at home.
My background is hardware and embedded systems rather than hospitality. I am not a working bartender and this site does not pretend otherwise. What an engineer brings to a recipe catalog is a different thing: 16,000 recipes are a dataset, and the useful questions about a dataset are which ingredients unlock the most drinks, which recipes are the same drink under three names, and what one more bottle on your shelf would actually add. Those are the questions the app answers and the ones the category pages here are built around.
Why I built it
Because the answer to "what can I make with what I have" was not available anywhere. Recipe sites are organised by the drink, which is only useful once you already know what you want. A home bar is organised by the bottle, and the interesting arithmetic runs the other way: six bottles chosen well make more drinks than ten chosen one favourite at a time. That is the whole idea, and it is written up in the first five bottles.
How the recipes work
The recipes are drawn from public cocktail data and standardised into one format: metric and imperial measurements, a consistent ingredient vocabulary, and a category for every bottle so that a recipe calling for a specific gin still matches the gin you own. No recipe on this site is invented by a language model. Editorial writing, which is everything in Learn, is mine.
Near-duplicates are collapsed rather than deleted, so the catalog you browse is the curated set and the full 16,000 stay one switch away in the app. Every recipe page remains readable on the web with no account.
Getting in touch
Corrections are welcome and get made. Reach me through @sodavaultapp on Instagram or @sodavaultapp on TikTok.
Start with the cocktail categories or read the Learn section.
