iPhone app showdown: Beer vs. Wine vs. Cocktails

I wanted to see what booze applications were available for the iPhone so I searched for beer, wine, and cocktails. Under cocktails, a whopping four applications came up. They all list recipes, and that's it. The coolest looking one with pictures of the drinks is in German.

It's a fairly disappointing selection. There should be virtual cocktail shakers and lime squeezers and conversion calculators between metric and standard just pretty pictures of drinks. Alas.

But the wine section is worse. Most of the items that came up in the search aren't actually wine applications. The ones that are are all versions of rating and tasting notes systems. Some come with the notes and others are applications for you to add them all. The advantages these have is for most of them you can take a picture of the label with your camera and add it to the review.

The beer people, on the other hand, are crafty. There are tasting/rating notes systems just like for the wine snobs, but much, much more. There are a few versions of virtual beer- one a foamy beer that you can "shake;" another a 40-ouncer that you can pour out in tribute to your fallen homies.

 

Also mostly in the beer section are all sorts of counters and calculators to track how much you've been drinking. My favorite is literally just a number counter that you increment for each beer you've consumed. Other ones are more complicated and try to compute your blood alcohol level based on your body weight and what specifically you've been drinking.

 

In any case, for the iPhone alcohol application creativity, this round goes to the beer drinkers.