Food & Nutrition Calculators

A sourdough feeding ratio such as 1:1:1 or 1:5:5 describes starter, flour, and water by weight, and it works as a dial for timing and flavor, not a fixed rule. Add 1 (the starter) to the flour and water ratios to get the total number of parts, divide your target weight by that number, then multiply by each ratio to get exact gram amounts. That's the math behind the sourdough starter calculator on this site, worth knowing even if you let the tool do it.

The ratio you pick changes more than the amount of flour and water in the jar. A 1:1:1 feed ferments fastest, often peaking in 4 to 6 hours at room temperature and tasting more sour, because proportionally more established starter is diluted with less fresh food. A 1:2:2 feed stretches that to roughly 6 to 8 hours, which suits a feed-tonight, bake-tomorrow schedule. A 1:5:5 feed slows things further, into a 10-to-14-hour range better suited to overnight builds or a cooler kitchen.

All three of the calculator's supported ratios use equal flour and water, so every one of them produces a starter at 100% hydration — only the fermentation speed and sourness change, not the hydration. Flour choice interacts with this too: a starter fed partly with whole wheat or rye ferments faster than one fed only white bread flour, since whole grains carry more of the wild yeast and bacteria a starter depends on, which is worth checking before assuming a slow starter is unhealthy.

Most caterers and wedding planners start from one drink per guest per hour, the default the wedding alcohol calculator on this site uses to turn guest count and event length into a total drink count. It's a planning average, not a promise: light-drinking crowds run near 0.8 drinks per hour, average evening receptions sit near 1, and heavier Saturday-night crowds push past 1.2. Enter what you actually know about your guests rather than leaving the default in place if your crowd skews light or heavy.

Once you have a total, splitting it across beer, wine, and spirits has no single industry-standard ratio — sources vary between roughly 40 to 50 percent beer, 35 to 40 percent wine, and 15 to 20 percent spirits, or a split closer to half spirits with beer and wine sharing the rest. Converting each share into bottles depends on standard pours: a 750ml wine bottle yields about five 5-ounce glasses, and a 750ml spirits bottle poured at a standard 1.5-ounce shot yields roughly 16 servings.

Two adjustments matter before finalizing an order. First, enter the number of guests actually expected to drink, not the full headcount — 10 to 20 percent of wedding guests typically don't drink, and some UK survey data puts that figure as high as a quarter. Second, add a buffer of roughly 10 to 15 percent on top of the calculated total, which is the convention most US bartenders work from and low-risk given that most retailers accept returns on unopened bottles.

Sourdough feeding and wedding alcohol buying look unrelated, but both punish the same mistake: eyeballing a ratio instead of calculating it. A baker who guesses a 1:2:2 feed by scoop rather than weight gets a hydration and fermentation speed that drifts batch to batch, making it hard to tell whether a slow rise is the schedule, the temperature, or a bad guess at proportions. A host who guesses at drink quantities either runs out mid-reception or ends up with unopened extras.

In both cases, the fix is the same: start from a real formula — parts-based ratios for starter, guests times hours times a per-person rate for alcohol — then adjust inputs to match your actual situation rather than trusting one fixed number for every case. The calculators in this category do that arithmetic exactly, so the only judgment call left is picking numbers that reflect your kitchen's temperature or your guest list's habits, not the multiplication itself.

The part-based math behind the sourdough starter calculator on this page isn't unique to sourdough — it's the same approach professional bakers use to scale any recipe up or down, and it's worth knowing even outside a starter jar. A recipe written in ratios (rather than fixed cup or gram amounts) states each ingredient as a multiple of one base ingredient, usually flour. A basic bread dough might run 100% flour, 60% water, 2% salt, 1% yeast — read as percentages of the flour weight, not of the total dough. To scale that recipe to any batch size, pick a target flour weight, then multiply every other ingredient's percentage by that same number.

This is exactly the search shoppers are making when they look for a "recipe conversion calculator": most fixed recipes are written for one specific yield (a dozen cookies, one 9-inch cake), and doubling or halving them by eye tends to throw off texture, since ingredients like leavening agents, salt, and spices don't always scale in a straight line the way flour and sugar do. Baker's percentages sidestep that problem for bread and dough recipes specifically, because everything is already expressed relative to the flour, so multiplying the whole ratio by a scale factor keeps every ingredient in the same proportion to every other one.

The same logic that turns a sourdough ratio into exact gram amounts on this page applies directly here: identify the base ingredient, express every other ingredient as a ratio or percentage of it, then multiply the whole set by whatever scale factor gets you to your target yield. It's the same reason a caterer estimating drinks per guest and a baker doubling a loaf recipe are doing near-identical arithmetic — proportional scaling from a known ratio, not guesswork.