Cocktail recipes on finger tips

A Negroni, anyone? Or maybe a Jack Rose? Knowing how to make good cocktails is a great party trick and almost always more interesting than serving wine or beer to guests. And even if you are a complete cocktail novice, you can deliver delicious drinks, as long as you have the right app.

Mixology is one of the very best cocktail-making apps out there. It has a database of around 8,000 cocktail recipes, using over 1,000 ingredients, so whatever your taste, the odds are that Mixology can help.

To find out how to make a particular cocktail, you can either search for it by name or find it in a category-based search. The app also has a “new and featured” page, and it has a “random drinks” function if you are feeling lucky.

Any recipe you like can be added to a favourites list for easy access later. Tapping on a listed cocktail takes you to a page showing the necessary ingredients and detailed but clear instructions on how to put the drink together.

The best bit of Mixology, though, is the “drinks cabinet” section, especially if you have a liquor cabinet full of odd half-empty bottles. In this section, you can enter details of the different spirits you have available and see which cocktails you can fashion out of them.

Mixology has well-written text and interesting images and is easy to navigate. The app can show its measurements in American or metric style and also includes recipes for punches and shots as well as classic cocktails. Best of all, the app is free for iOS and Android. If you pay $2 (Rs 126) to upgrade to the Mixologist version you can add your own cocktail recipes to the app.

For a different cocktail-making experience, Cocktail Flow - free on iOS and Android - is worth trying. Cocktail Flow is more visually appealing than some rivals and has a clear and easy-to-use interface.

The app also lists the ingredients needed for each cocktail in a clear way, with colors for different ingredients. It also groups similar drinks in an interesting fashion in its “discover” section, listing “Prohibition era” cocktails all together. Cocktail Flow also gives an indication of how strong each drink is and lets you share information about it over social media.

Like Mixology, Cocktail Flow also has a section where you can discover what recipe you can make from liquors you already have on your shelf.

The app’s main downfall is that its drinks database is only about 600 drinks, and to buy more you have to pay about $1 (Rs 63.2) each for a category of drinks, like Valentine’s Day or Christmas. But Cocktail Flow is definitely the most stylish cocktail recipe app around.

On iOS, Lush: Cocktail and Mixed Drink Recipes is also stylish, with an Apple-like minimalist design. The app has hundreds of drinks in its database and each drink has an illustration instead of boring photos. You can find a cocktail by searching a name or an ingredient.

The most interesting feature of Lush is its flavor profile database. You want something citrusy? If you look under lemon in Lush’s list you will find drinks that match this flavor, like the Aviation or the Air Force One. It’s clever, and also a really interesting way to discover new cocktails. Lush is $2 (Rs 126), and is iOS-only.

Onthebar, which is free on iOS and Android, is a different sort of cocktail app. It’s actually a sort of social network meant to connect bartenders and patrons. But as part of this social experience, the app also has a large section dedicated to cocktail recipes that its bartender users have uploaded themselves.

This database of drinks is a little simpler than many other drink apps, because you can only search for drinks by name or see them filtered by those that are new, “en fuego” or have been uploaded by nearby users. In addition, the quality of the recipes varies because they are filled in by users. Some drinks lack detailed instructions. Still, it’s definitely a good app for finding new cocktail recipes and for finding nearby places where you can test out the drinks before you try to make them.