Starting out

Already have a bottle? How to adopt it into the app

2 minute read · The Blending School

Most people who track an infinity bottle started it long before they tracked it. Adoption means taking an honest snapshot today and keeping perfect books from here on.

The snapshot

Sit down with the bottle and reconstruct what you can:

• Total volume. Measure or estimate what is in the vessel right now.
• The cast. List the whiskeys you know went in, with your best guess at how much of each remains as a share of the bottle. Memory plus taste gets you surprisingly far: you know whether it leans on the Booker's or barely remembers the Basil Hayden.
• The proof. If you have no records at all, estimate from the cast, or split the difference of what you typically added. Precision comes later; honesty comes now.

Why adoption beats restarting

Dumping a two-year bottle to "start clean" for the sake of clean data is backwards; the bottle is the point, the data serves it. Adoption keeps the character you spent years building and simply starts the books mid-story. In Thief & Blend this is a first-class flow: the app asks whether you are starting fresh or adopting, takes the snapshot, and marks everything derived from it as since-adoption so the estimate is never dressed up as fact.

What sharpens over time

From the snapshot forward, every addition is exact, so the bottle's records get more accurate every month as new, fully-known pours dilute the estimated base. A year after adoption, most of the bottle is precisely accounted for. The Ship of Theseus meter quietly documents the changeover: the estimated era shrinking, the recorded era growing.