Actually the english stemmer from libstemmer/snowball is already used. Additionally there is a wordforms list, that at the moment maps only whisky to whiskey. ;

Actually the english stemmer from libstemmer/snowball is already used. Additionally there is a wordforms list, that at the moment maps only whisky to whiskey. ;) Feel free to do a pull request, if you know other words that must be normalized. I have also just added an advanced charset_table, mapping amongst others "é" to "e". So when you search now for "créme", you get the same recipes as for "creme". At the moment I only crawl Wikipedia, liquor.com and seriouseats.com for cocktail recipes. But thanks for mentioning Esquire. I didn't knew that website yet. Maybe I will crawl them as well in the future. One direction mapping of words is unfortunately not possible with sphinx. However I could expand "brandy" to "brandy OR cognac OR calvados", just before I run the query. I will consider that approach.