Yeah, mine is driven by Django Rest and an Angular app for the UI. I'm seriously considering moving to React, though. I just use Sqlite for the DB layer because it's easily performant enough.

I used Drink & Tell (and its sequel Drunk & Told) for the primary source of recipes, which I can't recommend more.

The "related recipes" thing is interesting. If I stick to doing it with a sql query, then I think an algorithm to pick out the base spirit, then filter on that and on whether it's shaken/stirred/scaffa, then sort by common ingredient count? Then again, an Elastic Search stack can do related objects out of the box, but I wouldn't want it to get that complex :)