Introducing the Connoisseur's Alcohol Calculator

Working with spirit as a professional, there are lots of calculations to do, some of them not quite trivial. The most complex one is of course calculating the density of an alcohol-water-mixture from its ABV (or the other way around), which is central to knowing how much spirit one has in a container (using a scale) or how much water to add to dilute the spirit to a target strength.

Using my programming skills, I recreated some of the computations that were introduced as an international standard in 1972. I wrote the code in JavaScript, the programming language of the web (browser), which had unexpected benefits: I was able to use that code in places I never suspected, like in Google Sheets!

Recently, I sat down with one of my customers who had purchased 5 bottles of Whisky at cask strength to figure out at which strength he preferred to drink the Whisky, but also how much Whisky and water he needed to create small bottles as gifts or for himself.

Upon coming home that evening, I proceeded to take the code I already had and created a handy little tool to do that, and some more.

• What is the ABV of my Whisky after adding a spoonful of water?
• How much water do I need to bring the ABV down to, say, 46%?
• If I wanted to fill a bottle at 40% for an aunt who wouldn’t enjoy cask strength whisky, how much Whisky and water do I need?

Go get a kitchen scale, and head over to my Connoisseur’s Alcohol Calculator to figure all of that out. I hope it’s useful!