Pour Proof
The Honest Pour System
How to use it
Pour Proof is the book's argument turned into a working instrument. You build a drink the way you'd build it on the rail. It tells you what the water, the sugar and the alcohol are actually doing to it. Then it helps you fix the one that's off.
Nothing to install. Nothing to sign up for. It opens in a browser and it runs on your phone behind the bar.
What it is
Build the drink. Every pour you change moves the numbers on the right, live.
The specs and tastings you saved. They stay on your device.
633 pours to search, plus your own house batches and anything you make yourself.
What the math is doing and where it stops. Read this one once.
Step by step
Open Formulate. Pick your base, set the pour, add the rest. Ounces, the way you'd call it out. Hit + Add another ingredient for each one.
The right side moves as you pour. Finished volume, dilution, final ABV, sugar, acid, and how much water you're actually adding. Change two ounces to three and every number moves with it.
Anything it doesn't know, it says it doesn't know. It never fills a blank with a zero.
Ice format, technique, equipment, shake time. You can weigh the tin before chilling and after straining and give it the real water number instead of an estimate. That's the trial it remembers.
Too sweet. Too thin. Too hot. Pick what you tasted, pick the ingredient to move, and hit Preview adjustment. It shows you the next build before you commit to it. Keep it or undo it.
Tasting notebook, then save. The spec and what you thought of it go in the Archive together, on your device. Next shift you're not starting over.
Your backbar
633 spirits, mixers, bitters, purées and house prep to search. Published flavor notes keep their source. Your notes stay yours.
Make something nobody's heard of? Create a custom ingredient. Batch it for service? Record a new house batch — recipe, finished yield, measurements — and pick it by name when you build.
Two things most people miss
Both are cameras doing exactly one job each. The wash-line can't see through foam or garnish, and the shake scan can't taste anything. The app says so itself, on the screen.
The honest part
Dilution is the ingredient nobody writes on the spec sheet, and it's the one that decides whether the drink lands. Pour Proof makes it a number you can see and argue with.
Cold is a spec.
It will not tell you a drink is good. It will not guarantee flavor, and it will not tell you anything about what's safe to serve. ABV assumes additive volumes. Acid is reported as citric equivalent, not pH. Sugar is grams, not a Brix reading. Where it's estimating, it prints the word estimate on the screen.
On your phone
Open it in Safari → Share → Add to Home Screen. It opens full screen after that, like any other app.
Open it in Chrome → menu → Install app (or Add to Home screen).
Once it's on, it works without a signal. Everything you save lives on that device — no account, no cloud, nothing leaving your phone. Which also means clearing your browser data clears your archive, so a spec you care about is worth writing down somewhere else too.
Where it came from
Pour Proof is built on The Honest Pour — Ron Mosholder's book about the job, published by Organized Chaos Press. The book makes the argument. This is the argument you can pour into a glass.