Happy hour with Gemini: How I built my perfect summer bartender

If you open the liquor cabinets (plural) in my home, you’ll find an eclectic collection of spirits ranging from the mundane to the random and unique bottles my husband and I have bought in some small or unknown town during our travels. My husband likes to joke that I gifted him a basic bartending course and now I’m benefiting from it, but in my mind, it was a sound financial investment for both of us.

The problem, though, is that there isn’t a course varied enough to cover all of our niche spirits, and sifting through tons of online recipe sites for one weird ingredient often yields super complicated cocktails with more ingredients that I don’t have at hand. Meanwhile, it’s sad to see dozens of bottles sitting unopened, waiting for the perfect cocktail or recipe inspiration to hit. So I decided to take matters into my own hands, or into Gemini model’s proverbial hands, and create a bartender who understands me and my ingredient list. The results are often hits, sometimes misses, but you bet that I’m having a lot of fun “testing” this feature for science, and work, of course…

My first experience with my Gemini bartender was a quick chat with Gemini Live. I had a lot of leftover celery leaves with some mint, and I was wondering if they could be used in a cocktail. I asked Gemini if they’d fit in a cocktail, and it suggested a celery and mint mojito. Nothing fancy, but not something I would’ve thought about off the top of my head — I’m still a baby bartender after all.

The result, though, was so nice and refreshing that I had to do a few double-takes because I didn’t think celery leaves would work this well in a cocktail. The ratio was perfectly balanced with the mint. The mix was so good that whenever I’ve had a bit of celery for other purposes since that fateful day, I’ve been cutting off some extra leaves to redo this same cocktail. It’s a fantastic summer winner. Point, Gemini.

From that day on, I knew I had a tool to help me craft interesting cocktails from scratch (or from other online recipes that I’m too lazy to sift through), but what about replicating existing ones? See, whenever I order a drink at a bar or restaurant and I like it, I have trouble replicating it at home. I am not addicted to alcohol enough to go through many stages of trials and errors; I’d rather just get the recipe right from the get-go. But no bar or restaurant is ever gonna share their specialty, so to Gemini I turn.

I’ve been sharing the ingredient description of the best specialty cocktails I find and asking Gemini to figure out the recipe. The results are better than what my personal approximation would’ve been, to be honest, with the right balance between spirits, syrups, lemon juice, simple syrup, and others. It feels less like fumbling and more like an educated guess; Gemini puts me on the right track, and I can make minor adjustments to get as close as possible to the original creation.

Thanks to this, I’ve been able to replicate the most balanced and refreshing summer cocktail I’ve ever had at any restaurant/bar (Smäak in Tours, France) with rosemary-infused gin, elderflower liqueur, and crème de cassis. Gemini’s original recipe didn’t include any lemon juice, but in my fading memories, there was a bit of sourness to the original cocktail, so I asked Gemini to add it, and the result was absolute perfection. Now, two years later, Smäak is sadly closed in Tours, but its cocktail lives on in my home. Another Gemini win.

After all that experimentation, I realized the final boss stage in my battle would be to create my own bartender — an agent that knows me, what I have in my liquor storage, what I don’t always have at hand, what I like, and what I don’t. And that required building my personal bartending Gemini gem.

I started by making a spreadsheet of all the spirits and cocktail ingredients in our deep-lying cabinets. It’s a simple Google Sheet with one ingredient per row that I can easily keep updated by adding or removing items. Then, I went to Gemini, clicked on Explore Gems > New Gem, and linked my Google Drive file into the Knowledge panel at the bottom. That way, I don’t have to re-teach Gemini my ingredients every time; I can update the document, and it has access to the new additions or recent removals.

On top of that, I gave Gemini extra instructions, explaining the staple ingredients I have, what I like, and told it to always give me three suggestions when building recipes. It took a few tweaks, but the instructions are now well-suited for my use. Whenever I want some fresh inspiration, I ask Gemini for a new cocktail by giving it one main ingredient or flavor request, and it delivers.

This has led to weird experimentation with fresh basil and rum in a daiquiri (not recommended), then with aniseed liqueur instead (a surprising new favorite!), and with licorice liqueur (a middling result).

I’ve been having fun since February, and at a rate of one new cocktail per week or two weeks, you can guess that there are several non-photographed creations here, from a fig and thyme sparkler with gin (recommended) to a berry and yogurt liqueur smoothie that Gemini cheekily suggested could be a nice breakfast and cocktail in one. It’s always 5 PM somewhere, as they say!

Of all the Gemini use cases and all the special gems I’ve created, I must admit that this is the best one — and not only because of the delicious cocktails! It’s so easy to keep the spreadsheet updated, and it’s awesome to have all the instructions ready in a gem, so I don’t have to retype all of them or forget something. Plus, it’s been fun to push Gemini with random ingredient suggestions or simply let it get creative by telling it “surprise me.”

Honestly, if I had the time to read or watch all the bartending creators out there, I’d do it; I prefer the personal touch, recommendations, and tips. But sadly, this is a quick hobby for me, so I do enjoy the AI shortcut and having a massive smarter search engine at my disposal, if only because it won’t waste my time by surfacing cocktails with ingredients I don’t have at hand. If you’re a spirits collector like me, I suggest you build your own spreadsheet and gem, too. You might be surprised by all the inspiration it’ll bring.