It’s good, but there’s room for improvement
4
By logan3-1639
This is the first cocktails app I’ve installed, and I paid the one-time fee for the upgrade that adds hundreds more recipes to the app’s database. Because it’s the only app of its kind that I’ve used, I have nothing to compare it to.
There are way more drinks in the database than I’ll ever try, but it’s good to have so many drink recipes to explore. I like that I can check favorite recipes, which get added to a “Favorites” collection. That makes it easy to find them again.
You can also create your own collection of recipes, although I don’t see myself doing that. Also, each image is accompanied by a colorful image of a glass containing the finished beverage in the recipe. The image isn’t a photograph, rather, it’s an artist’s rendering that suggests what the finished drink looks like. Personally, I’d rather see a photograph, but I don’t object to the illustrations.
You can create individual drink recipes, too, and this is a nice feature, which brings me to a criticism. I created my first recipe for a Mai Tai, because the recipe included in the app doesn’t mention ice. I’d never had a Mai Tai before, but I couldn’t imagine it wouldn’t include ice. So I googled Mai Tai, and sure enough, it’s made with crushed ice.
If there was a way to edit recipes in the default database, I would have added a sentence in the description of how to make the drink, but the default recipes can’t be edited. So I created a new recipe for Trader Vic’s version of the Mai Tai and noted that it requires crushed ice.
Another criticism is that there are a lot of typos and misspellings. The first drink that appears on the default “Cocktails” tab is the “Honye B.” I cold be wrong, but I think it’s supposed to be spelled “Honey B,” since one of the ingredients is honey. And that brings up another issue. In the recipe for “Honye B,” the measurement for the honey ingredient is “20 pc.”
That measurement also appears in the ingredients for a Bloody Mary... Worcestershire sauce: 3 pc, and Pepper: 2 pc. What is a “pc”? Maybe if I were a mixologist, I’d know what a “pc” of honey is, but I have no idea.
The instructions for a Kamikaze read, “Shake with ice cube and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.” Just one ice cube? My intuition says ice *cubes* but the ambiguous instructions would lead me to google the drink recipe just to be sure.
The Mojito recipe calls for mint *sprigs,* but the mixing instructions say “muddle mint *springs* with sugar and lime juice...” It’s obvious that the author meant to say “muddle mint *sprigs,*” but this is another example of sloppy, or nonexistent, copy editing.
I’ve only looked at a few dozen recipes and found the errors above. I’m guessing that there are probably several more typos, spelling, and usage errors among the hundreds of recipes that I haven’t viewed yet.
The point, for me, is that all of these little errors (including omitting the crushed ice for the Mai Tai recipe) don’t inspire confidence in the app. I shouldn’t have to google a drink recipe to verify that a recipe included in this app is accurate. I appreciate what the developer has done, and the app is useful, but it doesn’t reflect the highest level of professionalism. It’s not polished.