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The Lab / Premium tool

Spirit & Botanical
Pairing Matchmaker

Rank every botanical against a spirit, or every spirit against a botanical — one shared, vetted dataset read from either end. And where a pairing falls short, a specific bridge: the third element that joins them, the mechanism it uses, and what not to reach for instead.

Interactive toolFree to useSaves to your browser

Choose a starting point, and it ranks the rest. This is a working guideline built from studio field practice — always taste and adjust from there.

01 — Where are you starting?

02 — Pick your spirit

Choose a spirit or a botanical to see ranked matches.

These pairings are studio field guidance, not a fixed rule — the ratings describe a starting expectation, and real ingredients (a heavily peated whisky, an unusually ripe botanical) can shift the result. Taste as you go, especially on anything marked "adventurous."

Field notes

Why the ratings only go to three stars

Excellent, good, or adventurous is the real precision the studio's tasting notes support — stretching that onto a five-star scale would imply a level of confidence the underlying judgment calls don't actually have. Three honest levels beat five inflated ones.

One shared dataset, not two opinions

This tool and the Infusion Calculator's own spirit-pairing chart pull from the exact same compatibility data. If you've already used the Infusion Calculator, nothing here will contradict what it told you — this just makes that same data browsable from either direction.

"Adventurous" isn't a warning

A one-star rating means the pairing has nothing else to lean on — no complementary depth, no buffer for excess bitterness or clashing sweetness — not that it fails. Some of the studio's favorite results started as a one-star pairing infused light and tasted forward.

Categories, not individual ingredients

Matching happens at the botanical-family level because that is where the useful generalisation lives. Within a family, individual ingredients still vary — two citrus peels can behave quite differently — so treat the category as the direction and the specific ingredient as the variable you tune.

Good pairings still need a ratio

A three-star match tells you two things belong together. It does not tell you how much, for how long, or at what strength. Take a promising pair into the Infusion Calculator to turn it into something you can actually build.

Where the ratings come from

Studio field practice and repeated bench testing, not a published database. They are opinionated by design — a compatibility chart with no point of view is just a list of ingredients.

Your Field Log

Nothing saved yet. Find a match above, then choose "Save to Field Log" to build a running record on this device.