Hey there,

for my new cocktail database I would like to link the ingredients of a cocktail to their respective SPIRITS table entry.

my first thought was to create a new table for ingredients with the ingredient name, amount and cocktail (linked to the cocktails id).

this however would give me tons of entrys that I don't really need.

Is there another quick and easy way to complish that?

You will need an Ingredients table, with a record for each ingredient. The ingredient record should also have a TYPE field on which "Spirit" could be one of the values. This type field could be used to filter the display of ingredients to make data entry easier.

There should be a Cocktails table, where a record is a different type of cocktail. There needs to a a separate record for each variation, i.e., record for strong martini, another for weak etc. If you want to have a solution that allows the section of, say, martinis, and then displays strong, weak, etc, then you need a "variations" table as well.

Between the Cocktails and Ingredients tables there should be a join table. You could call it Amounts I suppose. This join record contains the information for the amount of each ingredient that goes into each cocktail.

Cocktails -< Amounts >- Ingredients

or

Cocktails -< Variations -< Amounts >- Ingredients