As you’ve probably noticedby now, I’m taking a tour of the cocktail apps available in the iTunes App Store and evaluating which belong on your iPhone and which are total duds to be left in the dustbin to be ported to Android. If you haven’t read already, I am evaluating the applications in 5 areas:

• Usability: Intuitive search functions? Screen go dark too quickly? Conversion options? This will tell you.
• Quality and Depth: Does its Mai Tai call for Creme de Noyaux? Is it chock-full of 20 “Sex on the Beach” variations? If so, fail.
• Features: Is it feature-rich with background information on drinks? Does it allow favorites and ratings to be stored/sorted. If so, it should fare well.
• Likability: Subjective, but important. If the app is fun to use or gorgeously-designed or is simply a pleasure to use, it will gain high marks 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. Ultimately, I will round-up the “Best of the Best” that belong on anyone’s iPhone who is serious about cocktails and/or needs a handy reference behind the stick from time-to-time. Up now, Pocket Cocktails:

Pocket Cocktails
	Usability	Pocket Cocktails starts up quickly and presents you with a list of drink categories and then a nicely laid-out set of buttons allowing you to browse drinks, search, or find a random libation. The set of “categories” is a nice touch but when your “Martinis” section includes the Lemon Drop, the Espresso Martini (sic), and the Jolly Rancher and your “Classics” section includes the Sex on the Beach and the Hummer, you’re daring people to take issue with you and it makes the categories, for my purposes, nearly meaningless. However, the biggest usability issue is, unfortunately, a big one. Once you select a recipe from the nicely laid-out list, it takes you to the full-size image which then has a small menu bar labeled |Picture|Recipe|Ingredients|Email| . Imagine you’re flipping through a cookbook and a tantalizing recipe for Pork Rillette catches your eye. “I’ll make this, right now!,” you think. Lo and behold, you look below the photo and the recipe starts like this: “1. Cut the pork into pieces, 2. Pour the water into a heavy cast-iron pot and bring to a boil. Add the lard and the cut-up meat. …” You would quickly ask yourself, “WHAT water? HOW MUCH pork?! LARD?! Curse you, tantalizing and obtuse non-sequitur of a recipe!!” And then, when it told you, “Refer to page 247 for the list and proportions of ingredients,” you would think it the strangest cookbook ever designed. And, it would be. The method for making a drink is separated from the ingredients in just this way in Pocket Cocktails. So, when it tells you, “Muddle the mint leaves in the simple syrup,” you have no context for how many mint leaves or how much simple syrup you’re being asked for. This means that you have to click back-and-forth between the “Ingredients” and the “Recipe” sub-menu unless you feel like writing one or the other down and just referring to one screen. And that’s if you can keep the screen from going dark on you. It’s a problem, and it makes this app unwieldy and unfriendly to use.
Price: $.99	Quality/Depth:	The recipes in Pocket Cocktails are very hit-and-miss with a slight edge to miss. While it’s certainly superior to iShot Machine,33 there are fundamental issues with a few of the “control” recipes I’ve set out to evaluate in these reviews.33 The Mai Tai, for example, lists pineapple juice and amaretto among its constituent parts, the Old Fashioned is of the “fruit cocktail + bourbon” persuasion, the Bronx goes disastrously heavy on the orange juice, and the Margarita calls for lime cordial and simple syrup. One or two of these malfeasant mishaps of mixology I could let slide, but butchering nearly all of them is simply careless. To be fair, the Mojito is well within tolerances. The depth of recipes is better than average and it has a good selection of classics and variations while not being overwhelming about it all.
	Features:	Pocket Cocktails has a good set of features though most of them show a flaw in one way or another. The randomizer has decent audio samples except for one dreadful female voice saying, “Shake it don’t break it!,” that alarms you into wanting to throw your ill-possessed phone the first time you hear it. There is a nice “Sommelier” section that covers wines and food pairings (though they do make an inexplicable appearance in the Random drink feature) and the management of categories, search tools, and drink lists and favorites is intuitive and easy-to-navigate. It’s not the most feature-rich cocktail app but of the features they’ve implemented they’ve done a good job.
Producer: Robert Maran	Likability/Value:	I like the retro feel of the application, the drink images are very well-done (though some of the drinks are ill-fitted to glassware in which they’re presented), and it performs solidly. Where it loses its value is in its ease of use for when you’re actually making a drink and in the quality and fidelity of some of the recipes. There are certainly enough elements here to warrant its $.99 price but there are other applications at the same price-point that will give you better drinks with better design and layout.
	Overall:	Rating: This app has some positive elements but is its own worst enemy. The usability issue involving the separation of the drinks’ methods and ingredients and the questionable quality of the majority of the recipes make it a non-starter from my viewpoint. Impractical for real-time use and not up-to-snuff as a reference tool, it is a model of mediocrity. The amount of time spent on the application’s design and content reassures me that this was a good faith effort to design a quality cocktail application, but it falls just short in enough ways to cause me to sigh and hope future updates resolve some of the usability and quality issues the application suffers. I’ll keep it on my phone, but it will likely sit untouched, unloved, and squawking occasionally, “Shake it don’t break it!,” into the sad dark.

Read more on the Pocket Cocktails app:

• Doug Winship’s more positive review of Pocket Cocktails
• Apppodcast’s overview of Pocket Cocktails

Read cocktailnerd’s other iPhone Cocktail App Reviews:

• 101 Cocktails
• iShot Machine

3

1. faint praise indeed333
2. Mai Tai, Old Fashioned, Margarita, Bronx, and Mojito333

3