Cocktail Architect · founding members · September 2026
The Founding Table
We built the first digital sandbox for bartenders in the world, and it gives a bar back more than thirty hours a month. In November it meets the European trade, and we are opening a small number of founding places to the people who want their name on it from the start. This is what it returns, what it costs to get it in front of the room, and what a founding place gets you.
A question for you
Raise your hand if you have ever poured a drink away because it came out wrong. Now keep it up if you know exactly what that drink cost you.
We asked that from the HORECFEX stage in August, in Da Nang, and watched almost every hand go up, then watched almost all of them come down again. That gap is the business we are in. Worldwide.
A bar pays for three things every month and never sees one of them on an invoice.
More than thirty hours a month
Here is where those hours come from. The breakdown is our own, from a survey of bar managers and from four years behind a bar.
| Where those hours go today | A month |
|---|---|
| Developing and balancing new drinksFor example, four cocktail builds are poured away so that one drink could reach the menu. | 12+ hours |
| Recosting against new invoicesA supplier price moves, and every recipe carrying that product moves with it. | 6 hours |
| Calculating and writing up batchesScaling a recipe to volume, the water, the yield in serves. | 5 hours |
| Spec cards and training the shiftSo a new bartender pours exactly what the head bartender wrote. | 3+ hours |
| Preparations: sums, remakes and ruined batchesInfusions, cordials, clarifying. The mistake shows up after five litres are already made. | 4+ hours |
| Total | 30+ hours |
Thirty hours of a head bartender is about €450 a month and €5,400 a year. The subscription costs €120 a year.
What else it gives back
The hours are the largest part and they are not the only one. The figures below are our own arithmetic on one mid-sized cocktail bar, and the logic behind them is written out underneath.
| What the bar gets back | How it adds up | In a year |
|---|---|---|
| What those hours cost the bar The wage is paid whether the drink reaches the menu or not. | 360 hours a year at about €15 an hour | €5,400 |
| Product that stops going down the sink Development pours, not service pours. | Twelve drinks a menu, four builds discarded for each one, two menus a year | 96 drinks |
| What that product costs | 96 builds at roughly €2.40 of liquid each | €230 |
| Time to build a new menu The creative work happens first, and it happens costed. | Three days to a week today, one day in the app | 4 to 12 days |
| What the bar pays us Basic, at €12 a month or €120 a year. | One subscription | €120 |
| Returned against what it costs | €5,630 of time and product, against €120 | about 47× |
The logic behind those figures
| A bar changes its cocktail menu twice a year and puts twelve drinks on it. | input |
| Four builds go in the sink for every drink that reaches the menu. This is our own figure, from four years behind a bar. | 4 : 1 |
| A cocktail sells at €12 and carries about 20% of that in liquid cost, so one development build costs the bar €2.40. | €2.40 |
| A head bartender or bar manager costs the business about €15 an hour. | €15 |
| The app returns more than 30 hours a month. This is our own survey of bar managers building menus, batches and cost sheets. | 30 h |
Change any of these and the arithmetic moves, which is why they are written down rather than rolled into a headline. Raise the wage to €20 an hour and the annual return passes €7,400. Every figure here counts Basic only, and Basic carries no AI.
The drinks in the sink are the waste everybody can see. The hours cost more than twenty times as much, and nobody counts them at all.
How it does that
Pilots do not crash real planes to learn to fly. They use a simulator. We built the simulator for cocktails, and it works the way you would want it to: you write the recipe on the screen, and before you touch a bottle the app tells you what will be in the glass.
How strong it is, with the ice melt already counted. How sweet, how sour, how bitter. What it feels like in the mouth. What volume you actually end up with, and what it costs you. A recipe book tells you what somebody else made once. This tells you what you are making, right now.
A Pisco Sour comes out sharp and the app does not say that something is wrong. It says there is as much acid in the glass as fifty millilitres of lemon juice, that a sour wants twenty to thirty, and that you should cut about nineteen millilitres. You cut it, and the shape comes back into the zone. One try instead of five.
This is a Toronto, held against the Old Fashioned template. Sweetness, acidity, bitterness, strength and texture each show where the drink sits and where the template says it should sit, and the radar underneath draws the gap.
34.9% ABV, 3.8° Brix, 88.2 ml in the glass once dilution is counted. None of it was poured to find out.
Cocktail Architect
What we are describing is not a concept. We have already built the app, it is running, and we have a customer base of 111 people, an email list of 74 active subscribers, and a not-activated waiting list of 2,000 people. Our subscription and payment processes are sound and working. Cocktail Architect has shipped 146 updated versions in its first five months.
Every one of those people came through Meta, 96% of them from Instagram, and the waiting list came from there too. We also write a blog that bartenders actually read, at thatbartenderproject.com/blogs/behind-the-bar.
Load a Negroni and the app tells you it sits at 22.7% ABV, 10.9° Brix, pH 3.41, and it marks where a Negroni should sit on each of those, so you can see the gap before you pour. It knows that the perceived sweetness of that drink is 9.2°Bx, not 10.9, because sugar reads differently against bitterness. It knows a stir adds 20% water and a shake adds 40%.
Make an infusion, cook a cordial on it, clarify that with milk, and every step is saved as a finished ingredient that behaves correctly in the next drink and prices itself into the next menu. That chain is one of the parts nobody else has. So is the physics engine that tells you what happens in the glass before you make the drink. The analyser that shows you the gap between your drink now and the template, the family it belongs to. The workshop, where Fat Wash, oleo saccharums, carbonation or clarification are built and costed on the screen instead of being guessed at after five litres are already made. What makes it a sandbox is that all of it sits in one place, giving you the creative freedom to really play and make anything you desire. And if you do not find that little quirk you want? We will build it, just say the word.
An AI bar master sits on top of the engine, and it reads our own research base rather than the internet. It builds from the stock a bar actually has, and it writes the recipe straight into the app already calculated. The AI proposes and the physics decides, because every suggestion is recalculated by the same engine. It cannot invent a number to make its own idea look good.
And there is a screen where the bar counts money. Pack size and invoice price go in once, and the cost per millilitre lands in every recipe at once. No spreadsheet, and no counting in your head.
And the book that came before the app
Guide to the Classics. Eight templates, sixty-four cocktails, first edition 2026. It is not a recipe collection, it is the system that shows how a drink is put together underneath.
We sell it as an e-book and we have never printed it. We want it in print for November, in the hands of younger bartenders at the show, and we are looking for a printing partner to make that happen. The same logic lives inside the app, where a hundred classics are taken apart to their exact proportions.
This is not about making bars the same
McDonald's did not win on hamburgers. It won because it turned a kitchen into a system that produced the same result in any city, run by people who had never met each other. The lesson is the system, and the lesson is not the food. Nobody wants a bar that pours like a franchise, and we are not building one.
Here is what a bar actually buys today when it buys creative freedom. It gives its best bartender a week of paid hours and a shelf of real product, and it finds out whether the drink works at the end of that week, at the tasting, when the hours and the bottles are already gone. Approval comes last, so everything before it is spent on trust.
The sandbox turns that around. The brainstorming, the arguing, the twelve versions and the strange idea somebody wants to try all still happen, and they happen in the app, where a version costs nothing and comes out balanced and costed. The tasting is where a bar confirms a drink instead of discovering it. One day instead of a week, and the approval arrives before the money does.
Bars are closing across Europe, and they are not closing because bartenders stopped being good at this. They are closing because the margin will not carry the way the work is done. We think the craft survives by getting cheaper to practise, not smaller.
How big this gets
Every bar in the world runs on a standard that lives in one person's head. When that person leaves, the standard leaves with them. The drink changes, the pour cost changes, and nobody finds out until the month is counted. There are somewhere over a million bars and cocktail venues in the world, and not one of them has a system for this.
The plan is not a bartender's app. The plan is to become integrated in POS systems, where you can have everything in one place: your recipes, menus, the pour cost and the sales.
A POS system knows what a bar sold. It does not know what the bar poured, what that pour cost at today's invoice price, or whether the drink on the till is the drink the head bartender wrote. We know all three. Inside Europe we want the first integrations live within a year, and we want to be in tills across the world within a few. That is where the company stops being a subscription and starts being infrastructure.
We are five months old, we are first, and there is no competitor to point at. That is the opportunity, and it is also the clock.
Who is behind it
Oleg is a bartender with four years behind the bar in Europe, where he built signature menus and made his own vermouth. He got tired of guessing, so he learned to write software. The engine is his experience written down.
Nia runs the brand, the strategy and the growth. The numbers below are hers, and every one of them has a report behind it.
She has also sold out three live events and run two Amazon book launches to 38,000 copies. Growth here is not outsourced to an agency, because Nia is CEO and CMO and runs it herself. The figures above are what happened the last two times she did it. This is the third time she has built this, and the first time she owns it.
Why November, and why it cannot wait
The Athens Bar Show runs on 3 and 4 November at Technopolis. It is where the European trade goes, and that means bartenders, bar owners, bar managers, brand managers, importers, distributors and the people who fund all of them, in one building for two days.
We're confirming a stand in the Hospitality Technology area and two slots on the main stage. Alongside it, we want every ticket holder to leave with a free month of Cocktail Architect. That's an open conversation with the show.
That is roughly 17,000 bartenders, bar owners and brand managers. It is not an audience, it is our entire market, in one building, for two days.
The month they get is the Basic tier, which carries no AI, so serving all 17,000 costs us almost nothing. The economics of that are built into the software rather than promised, because paid AI usage is capped per user per week and per month before a request is ever sent. The running cost cannot outrun the revenue.
Everyone will be in that room whether we are there or not. We opened in May. If we are not on that floor in November, then in a year nobody in Europe will remember there was a first.
Those figures count Basic subscriptions only, at €12 a month. Every upgrade to Pro AI at €20 or Premium at €50 sits on top. And whatever the conversion turns out to be, the list itself stays, and it is a market we can survey, build a profile from and sell to for years.
What the money does
This is the whole number, not a headline. It carries us from today to the end of November with the stand paid for and the work actually done.
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| The show €1,500 for the Hospitality Technology stand, which covers its design, printing and installation, confirmed by Bar Academy and due now to hold the spot. Two talks on the Amphitheatro, a 300-seat stage with translation, at €800 each as our working figure; Bar Academy's director sets the final price after reviewing our proposals. €3,100 plus 24% VAT, if that figure holds. The show's own deck is here. | €3,844 |
| Tickets and accommodation Two flights to Athens, an apartment within walking distance of Technopolis, transport, food for seventeen days, the screen for the stand, and the liability insurance the show requires. | €2,320 |
| Three months of operating Two people working from September to the end of November, the infrastructure the app runs on, and a marketing budget. | €7,500 |
| Software already built The product you are reading about was written and invoiced, and that invoice falls due at the end of October. With the cost of receiving sponsor money, a local SIM and the domain. Opens below. | €2,485 |
| Total | €16,149 |
Open the fourth line
| Software already built, invoiced and falling due at the end of October. This is what it cost to write the product you are reading about, and it is a cost of the product rather than a cost of living. | €2,140 |
| Receiving and converting sponsor money. | €300 |
| A local SIM and data for two people. | €30 |
| Domain renewal. | €15 |
Ice, glassware, light electricity, overnight security and ten two-day tickets come with the stand. Those are worth roughly €500 to €1,100 and they are not counted anywhere above.
The €1,500 stand is the one that matters
Bar Academy confirmed it on 11 September: that is the full cost, and the spot does not exist until it is paid. One founding sponsor covers it outright. Everything else on this page follows from that payment landing, because there is no second Athens Bar Show this year.
The founding places
Three tracks, because a drinks brand, a bar and a technology company want completely different things from the same year. Every account below is lifetime Basic, and lifetime means as long as the product exists.
If you are a brand
- You take two lifetime Basic accounts, for your ambassador and your founder.
- You name a cocktail, we create it in your name, and it lives inside the app.
- Your logo goes on our stand and on the event page.
- We name you in both main-stage talks.
If you are a bar
- You take five lifetime Basic accounts, which covers the bar team.
- We run a training session with you on building menus in the app.
- Your bar appears in the Founding Members list.
If you are a brand
- You get everything above, and then your product lives inside the ingredient database for a year, co-branded.
- When a bartender needs a spirit for a Margarita, let's say, yours is the one on the digital shelf. We describe your product in the app: ABV, sugar and acidity.
- You get a named collection in the app.
- Creative bonus. We produce one video and a full set of stills, and they are yours to run as paid advertising. And we will share it on our accounts, @thatbartenderproject and @nia.wanderer.
If you are a bar
- You get everything above, and then ten lifetime Basic accounts.
- We build a full menu with you inside the app.
- Creative bonus. We run a growth and positioning audit of the venue. Or the same bonus the brands get, your choice. ;)
What you get
- You get everything in Launch Partner, and then a menu module co-created with your products.
- Oleg becomes your Brand Ambassador for three months. Two pieces of content a month on @thatbartenderproject, six in total. He pours your product on our stand across both show days and shares it in our lecture on the stage of the Athens Bar Show. And he builds one signature cocktail on your spirit, which we publish in the app under your brand's name.
- We report afterwards on redemptions, usage and reach.
The stand
- Your own stand is not included at this level. If you would like to take one at the show, it runs at €2,500 for the Boutique Brands area or €1,200 for a tasting stand, plus 24% VAT.
- At €15,000 we book and pay for your stand as part of the package, organising everything.
What you get
- You are named technology partner on the stand, on the site and inside the app.
- You hold first position in the integration queue.
- When we build the first POS integration, we build it with you and against your API. The build itself is a separate project on a separate contract. What this partnership buys is the place at the front of the queue, and the fact that the first integration we ever build is shaped around your system rather than somebody else's. Pinky promise.
- You take two lifetime Basic accounts, named to people you choose, and the right of first offer on equity.
Why a POS company wants this
- A cash register records every sale. It does not record what went into the glass, the products, the difference between one batch and the next, or what that pour cost at this week's invoice price. We do. It is the before-and-after note that brings a bar clarity, and because of that it helps them make more money, cut unnecessary costs earlier, and spend more on what is really needed. Put a POS and Cocktail Architect together and a bar can see the real margin on every drink it sells, on the day the bar sells it.
- A bar chooses its cash register by what it can see on the screen, and no other POS company can show a bartender a working cocktail engine inside their system.
- At €20,000 we hold that for you: we will not start building the same integration for a competing POS company for six months.
What you get
- You get everything above, and your stand is included.
- You are present in both main-stage talks.
- We produce a content package across the whole trip, and not a single video.
And the part nobody else gets
- You hold category exclusivity on featured placement for twelve months, so yours is the only brand of its kind we put in front of the room.
- You hold the right of first offer on equity, described below.
What we guarantee
Everything on this page that is ours to control carries a date. Your accounts are live within seven days of payment. Your name and logo are on the site and on the stand within fourteen days. Your range is in the ingredient database within fourteen days of your product data reaching us. Your video is delivered within thirty days of the shoot. If we miss one of those dates, that part of the fee comes back to you.
We do not guarantee how many of the show's ticket holders open the app, because that is their decision and not ours to sell you. We guarantee the work.
Terms & Conditions
What happens if the show underdelivers
If two hundred people take the free month instead of three thousand, we still end November with two hundred qualified people who told us who they are, which is a great deal more than we have today.
We survey them. We build the customer profile from real bartenders. We run focus groups. Then we market to people like them, with a marketing lead who has done exactly that at scale twice. The list is the asset in every version of this, and it does not expire in December.