If you have an iPhone, and you’re on this site, you’ve probably thought about them; all those cocktail apps at your disposal. So have I. So much so, in fact, that I’ve found over 20 of them I’d like to sit and evaluate and share with you. From the dubious iShot Machine to the venerable Cocktails+ (from the folks who brought us cocktaildb.com), I’ll consider these alternately indispensable and dispensable gadgets of the iPhone-toting-cocktail-swilling class.

I will be evaluating the applications in 5 areas:

• Usability: Does it have 20,000 recipes but no search or sorting tool? Does the screen go dark every 60 seconds and you find yourself having to reactivate the screen as you’re trying to layer your Pousse Café? Does it convert your drinks from ml to oz to kokus and back to ml? I’ll answer that question in this area.
• Quality and Depth: Of those 20,000 recipes, are 8,000 of them variations on the Duck Fart, the Alien Secretion, and various nefarious and soul-shattering attempts to justify the use of Red Bull in a Drink? Are there only 25 drinks and the rest is nonsense involving a mess of social media “tools” and ways to find the nearest bar? Do the pictures look like they were taken with an iPhone by a drunken sailor in a galley at high seas? If so, fail. I will also be taking 5 “baseline” cocktails and evaluating the recipes against what are “acceptable” versions amongst the cocktail cognoscenti. They will be the Mai Tai, the Mojito, the Old Fashioned, the Margarita, and the Bronx. All should be included in any cocktail database and are fairly well-established in what should, and should not, be included in them and in what proportions.
• Features: Does the app allow you to enter your own recipes? Does it provide background information on the drinks? Does it have additional content such as bartending and glassware information that is accurate? This will separate the cocktails from the cock-ups in the field.
• Likability: A completely subjective look at how the application strikes me. If it’s garish and cluttered, booo hiss. If it’s elegant and fun to use to boot, then yaaay win! Also, I may take into consideration the producer of the tool. If the app is a Bacardi-marketing ploy, it’ll take some hits here.
• Value: Charging me $1.99 for an advertisement-addled flaky piece of crap? Screw you, buddy! Giving me 2,000 recipes with quality photos and background information on the drinks from trusted sources for $3.99? Not bad! You get the idea.

All of these factors, at a weighting of my own choosing at that particular moment, will go into a final overall rating. The ultimate goal will be to take this morass of cocktailian bits and bytes and assemble “Cocktailnerd’s Recommended Cocktail Suite for the iPhone” since, naturally, the odds of there being “One App to Rule Them All and in Your Liver Bind Them” is nearly nil. There will be winners, there will be huge losers, just so long as you’re not one of them when you decide to spring for a cocktail application for your iPhone, eh? Let’s start with a collection of 3 very different cocktail apps: 101 Cocktails by the Mixographer, Jimmy Patrick, and will look at iShot Machine tomorrow, two very different applications.

101 Cocktails
	Usability	101 Cocktails is simple and elegant. It drops you into the app the first time with a picture of an Americano (not a bad start by any means) and only a few indications of what to do next. But once you figure out that you can display the recipe by turning the phone to landscape, which display the picture alongside the recipe, or can press the “I” (info) button to overlay the recipe for the drink on top of the photo, it becomes simple. There are several keypresses to get to a search function but with a catalog of drinks this exclusive it’s a rarely-used feature and you don’t miss quick access to a search too much. The primary purpose of the app, to find quality recipes for an exclusive set of drinks, is well met by its interface.
Price: $1.99	Quality/Depth:	As Jimmy Patrick says, “The question I have when looking at these kitchen sink recipe collections is always, ’Do I really need 14,000 cocktail recipes?’ My answer is always no. Working in a bar, as a professional bartender, you probably need 50 drink recipes on the fly.” And 101 Cocktails bears this philosophy out. It has, you guessed it, 101 recipes so it doesn’t get mondo points on “depth,” however, in the quality department it’s almost unsurpassed. Though I prefer more lime and orgeat in my Mai Tai, Jimmy goes so far as to chastise the reader for thoughts of grenadine, pineapple, or orange juice33 and the rest of the “baseline” recipes are pitch perfect.
	Features:	This is a lean application, but it gets points for not requiring an Internet connection or pestering me for my location. The “Send Recipe” feature, which allows you to email any recipe in only two keypresses, works very well and formats the email beautifully. The ability to rate and sort drinks by rating is a welcome one. There is also a nifty “Shake for Random Drink” feature that allows you to shake the iPhone and a random recipe will appear. Fun, even if I did find it accidentally due to the lack of instructions or “About” information in the application.
Producer: Jimmy Patrick	Likability/Value:	The photos are gorgeous, the ability to landscape and keep the image in view is a nice touch, and what it does, it does very well. Is it the warmest or cuddliest of applications? No, it’s relatively dry. But, as a budding cocktailian or someone who needs a quick reference to the most common classic cocktails in a guide you can rely on, this can’t be beat. The idea of sitting down with this and working through all 101 drinks over a few months is an exciting one and I highly recommend you try, especially at $1.99.
	Overall:	Rating: Solid, reliable, and trustworthy. It could stand to keep the screen lit when you’re viewing the recipe, have more operating instructions, and make it easier access to the search function (I cringe every time I have to tap the entry field to bring up the keyboard) but this is one that one can easily use as a quick reference from behind the bar or to peruse casually to find something that grabs your eye and, either way, not lead you astray.

Read more on the 101 Cocktails app:

Doug Winship’s review of 101 Cocktails

Jimmy Patrick’s discussion on its development

The co-developer’s discussion of its features and operating instructions

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1. good for you, Jimmy!333

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