Cocktails are the perfect summer drinks, full of fruity flavours and served ice cold to bring your body temperature down on a hot day at a beach bar or at a balmy evening BBQ. But for many people the thought of attempting to make anything more complicated than a margarita at home might be daunting. Thankfully there are plenty of mobile apps dedicated to enhancing your skills and improving your knowledge of cocktail making. You can download them to your smartphone and consult them whenever you next want to spice up a party and impress your guests. Here are just a few of the best cocktail apps from which to choose.
Mixology
Regularly rated as the best cocktail app on the market, Mixology remains a firm favourite of amateurs and pros alike. And with both a free and premium version available, you can download it and give it a test drive, then pay a small fee if you want to remove ads and access the full set of features. There are literally thousands of recipes included in its archive, while also giving you the option to add your own creations. You can even search for drinks with specific ingredients based upon what you’ve got in your drinks cabinet and get tips on the right techniques to use when stirring a cocktail.
Cocktail Flow
The catalogue of recipes available with this app may be smaller than that of Mixology, but it does offer a very impressive drink-matching feature that can suggest ideal cocktails to create even if you do not have that many spirits and mixers to hand. Free to download and use, Cocktail Flow is well designed and has a great looking interface with plenty of images that give you a great ideal as to how the finished products will appear, not just what they should contain. So if presentation is important then this will be a must-have app.
Highball
While some cocktail apps are ideal for beginners, Highball is better suited to those who know more than their fair share about mixing drinks and are looking for a platform to share their ideas and uncover other gems created by fellow users. In effect it is a pseudo-notebook that lets you create and share cocktails, complete with ingredients and instructions on how to make delicious tipples. It has all the old classics, as well as hundreds of other ideas to get your juices flowing, both figuratively and literally.
Distiller
This app is more about finding the best possible spirits to use in your cocktails than providing details on how to make drinks. And if you are planning to head out and re-stock your bar with top quality beverages, this is the best companion app to take along with you. Reviews and feedback from experts in the industry give you a great idea as to what’s hot and what’s not in the world of whisky, brandy, rum and more. And with users also given the opportunity to rate and react to spirits, there is a real community vibe to this app which might convince you to get involved.
Lush Cocktails
While this is a paid-for app with no free version available, it may be a good investment if you have ever struggled to make a decision when faced with an extensive cocktail menu. Rather than listing cocktails in a dry format, it lets you hone in on the drink that you are really craving by breaking them down into categories based on taste, texture, ingredients and a host of other criteria. This is a must for indecisive drinkers.