About this site.
Carl Busch is a bartender with fifteen years behind eastern Iowa bars, a three-time Iowa Top Mixologist, and co-owner of EJ’s Wine Shop & Tasting Room. This site is where the work that doesn’t make it into a guest’s glass ends up: recipes tested at the home bar, ingredient deep-dives, and the bar-math tools that make the testing repeatable.
Cedar Rapids, IA · 2026
What you’ll find here.
Recipes — the drinks I’ve made enough times to know they hold up. Every recipe is weighed in grams, not counted in dashes, because the dash is an honest unit only at certain bars. Servings, glass, dilution method, and substitutions are spelled out at the top of every page so you can decide if it fits your night before you read the method.
Articles — reviews, op-eds, technique pieces, and longer investigations. The reviews are written from blind side-by-sides at the home bar, not from press samples on a tasting-room table. The op-eds are honest. I’ve been wrong in public a few times and left the receipts up.
Ingredients — an encyclopedia, slowly growing. Each entry is a brand-level deep-dive: ABV, origin, producer, taste notes, best substitute, and a verdict on whether it earns its place on a back bar with limited shelf space.
Tools — four small calculators that do the math I do behind the bar. Batch a recipe for a crowd. Estimate dilution. Estimate finished ABV. Convert syrup ratios. They’re free, they don’t track you, and the math is shown in plain English next to each one.
I only recommend products I personally use and stand behind.
Press & podcasts.
- The Aviation CocktailEpisode 84 — Carl Busch on bonded rye and Iowa
- Edible IowaA weekend at EJ’s Wine Shop
- Drinks With FriendsEpisode 31 — The dirty martini renaissance
Get in touch.
Bookings, questions, polite disagreements, and bottle samples that arrive with a disclosure note — hello@carlbusch.com.
I read everything. I answer most of it. I don’t accept paid placements, and I don’t take comped reviews. The newsletter is free.
Affiliate disclosure
Carl Busch is reader-supported. Some links on this site are affiliate links, which means I may earn a commission at no cost to you when you buy through them. I only recommend bottles, books, and tools I would buy myself; affiliate status never changes a review. The link on a product page tells you which retailer the link goes to and whether it’s an affiliate.