We've been so heads in the sand working away, releasing, launching, tweaking that I completely forgot to update this changelog. So heres a HUUUUUGE update on everything we cooked up over the last 2-3 months. Read if you dare .....

Alongside all of this, we’ve made plenty of behind-the-scenes improvements to security, privacy, performance, reliability and general site maintenance.

We’ve given MyBar its biggest upgrade yet, added richer ways to record your cocktail experiences, and made the app smoother and more reliable throughout.

As well as the usual content creation (we've added a bunch of new delicious cocktails to the site), we're made some tiny polished paper cuts to the site.

You can now toggle view types in results when on mobile from basic list view to more comprehensive cards. We've also given some wording a bit more padding and defaulted the view to list mode on tag pages.

Along with this we've done the usual infrastructure cleanups - but this one was big - we invested in a new more powerful database to help serve all our content super fast and fresh. The costs have gone up for us, but its all worth it to ensure we are serving you the best content with the best speeds.

Along with all this, we've added some more thorough caching for the site, and updated all our dependencies. We're never quiet here at Make me a cocktail HQ!

Keep shaking and pouring. Have yourself a Carajillo old fashioned!

We've shipped a big batch of improvements aimed at helping you discover more cocktails and get better context on the ones you already love.

Tag hub pages

Every major tag now has its own dedicated home — a proper landing page with an intro, curated cocktail picks, and a row of related tags (with icons!) so you can hop sideways into adjacent flavors. Hunting for "tropical" or "smoky" drinks just got a lot more rewarding.

Smarter combo pages

Pages for ingredient combinations (think gin + lime, bourbon + mint) now open with a real intro that tells you what to expect from the pairing before you scroll into the recipes. Over 5,000 combinations got fresh write-ups.

Better video matches & multi-creator support

Cocktail videos are now picked more carefully so the clip on the page actually matches the drink you're looking at. And our video disclaimer has been generalized so we can credit any YouTube creator we feature, not just one — opening the door to a much wider library of demo videos.

Clearer answers on tricky cocktails

Drinks that share a name or get confused with similar recipes now have disambiguation FAQs answering the "wait, which one is this?" questions up front.

Improved search & SEO on tag results

Tag-based search results now lead with proper intro copy, so whether you arrive from Google or from inside the site, you get context before the recipe grid.

Polished translations

Big cleanup pass across all 8 languages — German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese (PT & BR), and English — with new strings for tags and page copy.

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Lots more cooking behind the scenes. Cheers! 🍸

It's been kinda wild recently, as we've pushed on and on in the cocktail world. First and foremost:

This one is huge for us. We basically rebuilt the whole UI on the app, added a heap of features, including but not limited to:

Plus a million other tweaks, changes and upgrades. Version 4 of the app got released about a week ago and so far the reception has been great! Thanks to you all

We had to make some financial decisions on how best to keep the site fast and operational, and with that in mind we went the other way - we decided to spend more money, put more infrastructure and speed in place to cope with the demand we have. We just can't put up with the site being slow or under performing for you.

Completely reworked pages there, with lots of information and interactivity there for you.

This was another big shift for us. A long time ago we have public profiles but we weren't happy at the way they were implemented, and we had privacy concerns so we shelved them. Well we've spent some reworking this whole section and now users can opt-in to making their profile public, with extra information and visibility for the pages. It's been great and we've loved reading about all you mixologists out there.

To be honest, we've been moving so fast recently that theres been a lot more going on. We've changed so much on the site, app, infrastructure and more that its hard to keep up to date with it all.

I'll try getting this change log more updated in the future, in more incremental parts, so we can highlight exactly whats been changed as and when it happens.

But for now, keep letting us know if theres anything else we can do, improve or build. We listen to you all.

Cheers

Honestly we've been so heads-down the last 6 weeks that we haven't been shouting about it nearly enough. So buckle up, because

there's A LOT to get through. Let's go!

This is THE big one. We've gone fully multi-lingual!

The site now properly speaks English, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, French, Italian, and Dutch — and we don't mean a half-baked Google Translate slapped over the top. We mean proper, deep, SEO-friendly, controller-level translations all the way down through the site. Every cocktail, every ingredient, every breadcrumb, every meta tag.

If you're a non-English speaker — please go and have a play, and let us know what you think (and shout if anything reads weirdly!).

We then turned our attention to speed, because nobody likes a slow website.

The result — pages that already felt snappy now feel instant. We're really proud of where the speed sits now.

Whilst we were under the bonnet anyway, we did a massive modernisation pass. New dependency bumps across the board, a full migration of our component system to a cleaner single-file setup. None of this is visible to you (which is kind of the point) — but it means we can build new features faster, more reliably, with fewer bugs. Boring but necessary, and a LOT of it!

This one's a bit more behind-the-scenes but it's already paying off massively.

We've spent 10 weeks building out a proper analytics + findings platform for ourselves. Think of it as a dashboard that tells us when something on the site is broken, slow, ranking badly, indexed wrongly, or just plain underperforming — and then gives us a one-click "briefing pack" to go and fix it. Reliability, performance, growth SEO, indexation, competitor intelligence, conversion, content production — every pillar covered.

It even has an agent remediation pilot built in, so some of the smaller fixes can be done semi-automatically. Wild stuff.

What it means for you — fewer broken pages, faster pages, better content, faster.

Lots of API endpoint work shipping in the background ready for the app side of things — including the new MyBar resource which is laying the groundwork for the next big app push. Cancel protection, social auth refinements, rate limiting, the lot.

A few smaller goodies sprinkled throughout —

The site is now multi-lingual, MUCH faster, on a freshly-modernised stack, and we've got a brand new analytics brain making sure things stay that way. The next few months are going to feel really, really good.

As always — go have a play, shout if you spot anything weird, and happy mixing all!

We actually silently shipped this about 2 weeks ago, but we wanted to let it sit for a while and get used, receive some user feedback and tweak accordingly before we shouted about it. But we're so happy at where it's at now that its time to shout about it!

We launched a completely new, improved, amazing, swanky, streamlined (insert more adjectives) MyBar, and boy is it good.

Proper onboarding, live counts, live cocktail 'toasts' showing you what adding allows you to make! Proper 'Photo your bar', multi-bars, ingredient adding ... are just of the improvements and crazy new features.

Those few words don't do it justice, but we just think we've hit a great balance between simplicity with power where needed.

We're working on it for the App, with a complete app overhaul (version 4 coming soon), but boy are we proud of how this turned out.

Get making and shaking, and let us know any issues.

We made 3 massive updates to the site today, but unfortunately came under fire by the dreaded production server gremlins in the process. If you experienced any downtime today we're really sorry, but hopefully all working now.

However ..... the improvements are, well, HUGE!!!

The smallest (yet by no means small) of the three was we replaced our clever searching system with a locally hosted clever searching system. We were using Algolia before (paid for service) but moved the searching over to TypeSense. What does this mean for you all. Well

We've spent about 3-4 weeks cleaning up, adding, re-categorising our whole ingredient database. Not only do we now have over 10,000 ingredients in our database, they also are all categorised properly ready for our new MyBare coming you way. This may not seem like much on the surface in terms of deliverables for you all, but let me tell you, this was huge for us. We've put in a lot of effort here!

A new package got released literally today (Laravel Blaze for those who care), and we decided to put it on our site straight away. It's sped up all our pages by about 50%. So the home page, that did load up in just shy of 1s (for those on fast connections), now loads up in less than 500ms! Theres fast, and then theres fast!

We really couldnt believe the speed increase and we just had to get it out for you!

So as you can see, theres been 3 HUGE updates for you today, and ones that really lay the ground work for more advancements moving forward.

Cant stop, wont stop!

Happy mixing all.

As we silently rolled out a little bug update to our apps last week, we've been secretly working away on the new Add A Recipe feature on our site (coming to app soon). It allows you all to start adding (and sharing) your own cocktail creations with the world, all beautifully presented in our wonderful way on our site.

This is live now, you can test it out here:

Let us know what you create, we're excited to see it!

We've been busy releasing a host of minor changes before some big updates coming to you later on this quarter. However updated in the last couple of weeks:

One of the most asked for functionalities that we've been wanted to implement for a LOOOOONNNNGGGGG time has finally made its way to the web - social logins. We've implemented Google and Apple logins for you right now, and we're working on porting them over to the app shortly. We're hoping we've caught all the little edge cases, but do let us know if you have any issues with the sign-ins.