Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Food and drink/Beverages Task Force/style/measurements

message: First I feel it is necessary to decide on whether to use relative or absolute measurements.  For instance:
* Pall Mall - 1½ fl oz gin, ½ fl oz sweet vermouth, ½ fl oz dry vermouth, ½ fl oz white cream de cacao
* Hairy Virgin - 40% rum, 20% Orange-flavored liquor, 40% apple juice (Variations)
* Pamake - 3 parts sake and 1 part PAMA pomegranate flavored liquor.
The first example is absolute, the second two are relative.  Please indicate which you would prefer.  The poll will close at 23:59 on Monday Jan 15th Wednesday Jan 31st unless there is a lack of consensus or objection.  Happy-melon 22:03, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd like to see this extended to 23:59 UTC on January 31, 2007, just like the proposed name change. It might be just my brain having troubles coming to grips with this topic, but I think a little more discussion and more input is a good idea. I'll leave it for Happy-melon to decide since he made the proposal and seems more comfortable about all this than I am. --Willscrlt (Talk|Cntrb) 06:21, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: No objection, although if there isn't a bit more activity I'm going to get very bored waiting around....  Happy-melon 13:03, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

text: I'm temporarily deciding to be undecided on parts. See my comment below to understand why. --Willscrlt (Talk|Cntrb) 06:18, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

text: 4 fl oz, 2 fl oz, and ¾ fl oz can be converted to parts very easily if you use elementary ratios.  4:2:0.75 = 16:8:3, multiplying each term by four.  This is the simplest whole-number ratio in this case.  There is no reason why we couldn't express it as "8 parts X, 4 parts Y and 1½ parts Z", although three quarters seems a little too obscure.  Your analysis of "6 parts, 9 parts and 1 part" is entirely correct, and sounds perfectly reasonable if it is sorted in descending order.  If the consensus arrives at relative measures, as it currently appears, we must decide on a standard, perhaps allowing only integral or half measures.  Notice that the meaning of "parts" and "measures" here is entirely equivalent, so at the moment can be used interchangeably (although it's something else we'd want to standardise).  Happy-melon 13:03, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Hey, the way I feel after trying to figure these things out, a bucket sounds just about right. :-) If we go with parts, 1 part sounds like a good minimum. If we go with measures, I could see going down to ½ measure or even ⅓ measure if that is reasonable in mixed drinks. I'm still confused (and maybe measuringly challenged), but how can measures and parts be equal? I thought a measure was equal to a "jigger", which is equal to a "shot", which is equal to the amount held in a standard shot glass, which is equal to 1½ fl oz (though I'm not sure if that is American or British). A part, I thought was just a ratio. In the above example of "8 parts X, 4 parts Y and 1½ parts Z", I don't see how that could be used to make a drink for one person. Yes, I can see it in a blenderful of the drink, but are we writing for people likely to mix up a huge batch of the stuff, or a small amount? Can we list both if and when both makes sense? Another thought is to list the yield or servings that a recipe makes if more than a single. If the yield is 8 servings, and you only want one, just divide by 8 (oh the math again!). But wouldn't it be simply to base the measurements for one drink and multiply up in size? Maybe we need an article that helps people like me figure out how all these measurements work. We could even have a table of common drink measurements (cl, US fl oz, UK fl oz, tsp, etc.) so that people can easily translate from whatever we choose into their own preferred method. We could include a link to such a page in the new infobox we are designing, and have the link next to the ingredients section for easy reference. Please understand that I'm really not inept in math and ratios and all (I've taken pre-calculus, though I won't tell you my grade), but pretty much anything other than fluid ounces seems pretty confusing (darn U.S. school system for never adequately teaching kids to use the metric system). Honestly, I think any standard we pick will confuse someone, so a page on Mixed drink measurements or Bartending measurements or something along those lines would be most helpful, especially if written for laymen in encyclopedic fashion (we don't want to cross into the Wikibooks b:Bartending manual's turf, though they don't have such a section, either). --Willscrlt (Talk|Cntrb) 11:45, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Relative or absolute

message: * PARTS - I suport parts as an international standard above petty disputes between metric and imperial measurement systems.  Happy-melon 22:12, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm temporarily deciding to be undecided on parts. See my comment below to understand why. --Willscrlt (Talk|Cntrb) 06:18, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Votes in favour of relative measurements

message: * centilitres (cl) - For IBA Official Cocktails only, and in addition to parts. I know it sounds like I am flip-flopping, but I'm not really. Since the cocktail recipes in the IBA competitions are essentially international standards, I think it is only right to include the standard measurements. Adding parts is useful for metric-deficient folks (like me) to interpret the amounts. See Amaretto#Beverages for examples. The Cafe Zürich is not an IBA cocktail, but I formatted it like the IBA ones on the same page. The others are IBAs. If Cafe Zürich were an article of its own, I would have left it as "parts" and not included the measurements. Though in this case, knowing that 3 parts is only 1½ fl oz does help put things into better perspective. Okay, yeah, I guess I am a gutless flip-flopper at times. Ha-ha. --Willscrlt (Talk|Cntrb) 07:33, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Votes in favour of absolute measurements

message: * AYE - I rarely drink, and these ratios, parts, measures, centilitres, American fluid ounces, British fluid ounces, dashes, teaspoons, and whatnot are all like a bad memory of a math class. I hereby vote to agree with whatever the majority decides so long as I don't have to do any of the conversions except for easy ones like "equal parts" or "2 parts / 1 parts". :-) I would like to point out that I just updated Caipirinha, which is an IBA Official Cocktail, and they used both centilitres and teaspoons in those instructions. *sigh* I still think that no matter how IBA lists it, we should list their measurements verbatim, but add our own standards proportionate to theirs. This makes it much more clear that the IBA standard is a true standard, and it reduces the potential for edit wars based on how strong a person likes his or her drink. You can argue proportions in any cocktail, but you can't argue about the proportions established by an international organization. This gives legitimacy (notability and credibility), and helps defend against claims that we are spamming Wikipedia with recipes, when we use international standards as defining attributes of the article's topic (i.e., the drink). If we use only our own agreed upon measurements, replacing the IBA standard ones, we no longer really are listing the IBA standard but our own. Outside of official cocktails, I could care less. I'm going to go back to something easier now like esoteric template designs. :-) --Willscrlt (Talk|Cntrb) 11:32, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Votes in favor of the majority decision

message: * Comment - Please see Talk:Tequila Sunrise (cocktail) for a related comment by an anonymous user. I faced the same problem I frequently face in these situations: how do I convert one measurement to parts? If the amounts are obviously equal or easy multiples of two from each other, then it's no problem. The original recipe called for 4 fl oz, 2 fl oz, and ¾ fl oz. I am fine with the first two (2 parts, 1 part), but that ¾ throws me. Add to the fact that that recipe did not match the IBA standard amounts (4.5 cl, 9 cl, and 1.5 cl, which convert to 1½ oz, 3 oz, and ½ oz). I suppose that means that the recipe is 6 parts, 9 parts, and 1 part, but that still seems clunky. Isn't 1½ oz a "measure"? If so, then 1 measure, 2 measures, and ⅓ measure actually make more sense to me in this case than parts do. I'm thinking I want to change my vote to undecided -- at least until my head stops hurting thinking about this. --Willscrlt (Talk|Cntrb) 06:17, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: 4 fl oz, 2 fl oz, and ¾ fl oz can be converted to parts very easily if you use elementary ratios.  4:2:0.75 = 16:8:3, multiplying each term by four.  This is the simplest whole-number ratio in this case.  There is no reason why we couldn't express it as "8 parts X, 4 parts Y and 1½ parts Z", although three quarters seems a little too obscure.  Your analysis of "6 parts, 9 parts and 1 part" is entirely correct, and sounds perfectly reasonable if it is sorted in descending order.  If the consensus arrives at relative measures, as it currently appears, we must decide on a standard, perhaps allowing only integral or half measures.  Notice that the meaning of "parts" and "measures" here is entirely equivalent, so at the moment can be used interchangeably (although it's something else we'd want to standardise).  Happy-melon 13:03, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Hey, the way I feel after trying to figure these things out, a bucket sounds just about right. :-) If we go with parts, 1 part sounds like a good minimum. If we go with measures, I could see going down to ½ measure or even ⅓ measure if that is reasonable in mixed drinks. I'm still confused (and maybe measuringly challenged), but how can measures and parts be equal? I thought a measure was equal to a "jigger", which is equal to a "shot", which is equal to the amount held in a standard shot glass, which is equal to 1½ fl oz (though I'm not sure if that is American or British). A part, I thought was just a ratio. In the above example of "8 parts X, 4 parts Y and 1½ parts Z", I don't see how that could be used to make a drink for one person. Yes, I can see it in a blenderful of the drink, but are we writing for people likely to mix up a huge batch of the stuff, or a small amount? Can we list both if and when both makes sense? Another thought is to list the yield or servings that a recipe makes if more than a single. If the yield is 8 servings, and you only want one, just divide by 8 (oh the math again!). But wouldn't it be simply to base the measurements for one drink and multiply up in size? Maybe we need an article that helps people like me figure out how all these measurements work. We could even have a table of common drink measurements (cl, US fl oz, UK fl oz, tsp, etc.) so that people can easily translate from whatever we choose into their own preferred method. We could include a link to such a page in the new infobox we are designing, and have the link next to the ingredients section for easy reference. Please understand that I'm really not inept in math and ratios and all (I've taken pre-calculus, though I won't tell you my grade), but pretty much anything other than fluid ounces seems pretty confusing (darn U.S. school system for never adequately teaching kids to use the metric system). Honestly, I think any standard we pick will confuse someone, so a page on Mixed drink measurements or Bartending measurements or something along those lines would be most helpful, especially if written for laymen in encyclopedic fashion (we don't want to cross into the Wikibooks b:Bartending manual's turf, though they don't have such a section, either). --Willscrlt (Talk|Cntrb) 11:45, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Comments and Questions