Remember college? Or, if you are in college, remember Friday night? You may have played the classic drinking game, King’s Cup. For those who have never played it, it’s fun for N-1 of the N people participating. That one person for whom it isn’t fun has to drink a mixture of the other beverages being consumed. Depending on the potent potables involved, it can be remarkably unpleasant. The concept of this curious concoction got me thinking about an interesting question: What would this drink comprise if hundreds of random cocktails contributed? In other words, what is the average cocktail?

Using Paul Knorr’s Big Bad-Ass Book of Cocktails, I extracted the ingredient list of all 1,500 recipes. I then summed the main components, which are in units of parts, and divided by 1,500 to get the average composition. I’ve graphed the top 20 ingredients, which comprise the majority of the drink, in the form of a cocktail normalized to 100 parts. The remaining 46.6% of the drink contains hundreds of ingredients – every liquor you can think of, plus a variety of other liquids and foods. I’m dubbing this average cocktail the Teetotaler’s Terror. In addition to the average cocktail, I calculated the top five splashes added to drinks and the top five garnishes; these values are shown as percentages of all cocktails. Finally, I’ve graphed how drinks are most commonly served. Straight up in this context means a drink that is shaken with ice to chill it, then strained and served without ice. The “other” category includes blended cocktails, as well as those that are served hot or at room temperature.

Data source:

http://www.amazon.com/Big-Bad-Ass-Book-Cocktails-Recipes-ebook/dp/B0035YDM7G/