Vote for Matt Robold (Rumdood) to be Tommy Bahama’s first Rumologist™. Once a day will make you feel great.
{Pictured above: NOT Matt Robold}

I recently got a tip from fellow cocktail blogger, Michael Dietsch, that several of our friends and fellows were nominated by Saveur magazine for their annual awards in the category of Best Cocktail Blog. You have to register to vote for your favorite, which is OK, but you also have to register just to see the list of nominees, which is kinda lame.
They also give no info on why they nominated each contestant, so I’ll do it for you.

Cask Strength is in what I call the Pro-Blogger Category. Andrew Bohrer is a Seattle-area bartender and very funny fellow. He blogs on a wide variety of subjects and drink styles. My favorite of his work is his current series 10 Rules of Drinking Like a Man (now up to number six).

Alcademics is the personal booze musings of professional writer Camper English. Camper gets to travel extensively around the country and world covering the liquor industry (this is why I hate him), and a lot of the peripheral stuff he’s not being paid to write about ends up on Alcademics. More importantly, he also is a an inveterate cocktail experimenter and the internet’s leading ice geek (and that is why I love him).

Cocktailians is the cocktailian project of Sam Meyer, a.k.a. Vidiot. It’s an entertaining collection of anecdotes, drink recipes, and an eternal source of Rule 2 linky goodness.

Another Pro-Blogger blog, Drink Dogma, is the project of Bobby Heugel. Bobby is one of my, and I suspect many cocktail bloggers’, personal heroes, in that he has gone from blogger to co-owner and creator of one of the country’s truly great craft cocktail bars, Anvil in Houston, Texas. During Anvil’s early stages of development, his blogging really fell off (I wonder why), but he has been writing much more lately, with great posts on the industry, drinks, and the bartending lifestyle.

Jeffrey Morganthaler’s eponymous blog is one of the granddaddys of the Cocktailosphere. One of Oregon’s leading bartenders, Jeffrey writes one of the more professionally utilitarian blogs out there. Many of his posts (though not all) are little reference resources that remain useful indefinitely. One such post is his Ginger Beer Brewing instruction that I once called The Greatest Cocktail Blog Post Ever.

Last (but only on the list) is the inimitable Kaiser Penguin. I’m tempted to call him the one and only “Garnishblogger“, but Rick does a lot more than that. He also is great with housemade ingredients, has an unhealthy obsession with Fernet Branca, and does some very fun thought pieces as well.

That is the six. Who am I voting for? Not telling, except to say that I am voting, and so should you!

Above the Post Update: I’m in the finals! You can vote for me here, or you can just Tweet the following: I want @dawinship’s #9 to win the @AskMen_com & @Liquordotcom #CocktailWar

AskMen, the “men’s lifestyle” portal, is running a contest right now, in conjunction with Liquor.com that’s worth a mention.

Hey, Doug!
What’s a “men’s lifestyle portal”?

It’s an online magazine where they have pictures of almost famous pretty women and talk about cars, pretty women, health issues, the health issues of meeting pretty women, clothes, clothes almost on pretty women, cocktails, and pretty women drinking cocktails. They also do lots of product reviews and promotions.

Oh, I see.
In other words, your dream job.

Exactly. And will you two butt out? This was supposed to to be a quick hit post… a glorified SideBlog.

Nothing is brief when we get involved, Doug!

Nothing is brief when YOU get involved, Doug!

Shut up.

Anyway, I find the contest interesting in that it is one of those hybrid contest/buzz creator thingies that use Twitter. The basic idea is for you to tweet your favorite cocktail recipe, and they will choose the top ten. (Here’s my tweet. Betcha can’t guess what drink I suggested!) Then the buzz thing goes on as they watch Twitter and the comments to see who gets the most buzz. The winner will receive the handsome $150 basket of mixological goodies you see above. The process is a bit more involved than that (of course) and you can read how to enter here.

I’ll conclude, with a nod to Rule 5, by noting a lovely convergence of the AskMen subject matter upon the Pegu world. I’m sure your eye will be drawn, as is mine, to the lovely bottles of Cointreau, that essential ingredient in the world’s best cocktail. While the cocktail Miss Dita Von Teese is holding seems a bit red for a Pegu, I’m sure that’s just a color-balance issue….

Monday was the second round of the Chopped Mixology Competition at Mozaik in the Columbus Arena District. (First round results here) I had the very cool opportunity to be a judge this time around, and it was a great time. This week’s winner was Zak Renzetti-Voit, who bartends at Black Olive. Zak benefited from some extensive experience in competitive mixology. He was one of Columbus’ Iron Bartenders, and also was a national finalist in the Bombay Sapphire Most Inspired Bartender competition in Las Vegas.

Zak Renzetti-Voit of Black Olive. Gin-haters, should go see him. He has a challenge for you….

The first round was marked by the exceptional looks of all the drinks. Among the secret ingredients that each contestant had to use in his or her drink were Finlandia Vodka and star fruit. (I never wrote down the exact lists, bad journalist! No cookie!) Each of the potions we were presented had that, “Ooh. What is that she’s having, bartender?” appearance.

Larry of J. Liu. He specializes in champagne cocktails, not three foot putts. Honest.

In fact, the first contestant to be chopped fell afoul of making his drink too pretty. Larry, who has been bar manager at J. Liu’s Dublin location almost since it opened, wanted the beautiful layered appearance you can just make out above in his Tidal Wave creation. But the separation of flavors made a well-conceived recipe taste unbalanced. Also, the very nifty lime boat garnishes he made each capsized as he brought the drinks over to us. There are fifty Poseidon Adventure jokes to be made, especially given the drink name of Tidal Wave, so I’ll leave them to you, dear reader, to make for yourself.
One area that this week’s contestants were much stronger on than last’s was in drink naming. I find that to be an important part of the scoring chart.

Bee, representing the Scarlett and Grey Café. Bee also creates drinks at Ozone

The next round won me and the other judges no friends. Jack Daniels lead the secret ingredients, along with dried chili peppers. We got three utterly different drinks this round, in taste and appearance. The other judges and I took some time to make a decision here.
The one who got chopped was Bee, who make a drink she called S’Mores. It was a cream-based highball with a lovely strawberry garnish. And it tasted really good, maybe the best of the round. But the problem was that neither of the two secret ingredients I mentioned were apparent at all in her final product. When I explained this as we announced our decision, I got us pretty comprehensively booed by Bee’s section of the crowd.
Actually, getting booed aside, the crowd is one of the really fun things about this competition. Each contestant has a lot of support among the multitude, and there is a lot of cheering and hollering. Also, many of the contestants make use of the stacks of shot glasses around them as they are formulating their entries, trying variations out on the fans clustered around them as they work.
While Michael and Zak prepared for the final challenge, Bee and Larry came back out for a lightning round shot contest. They formulated and served up shots for the crowd as quickly as possible in a naked attempt to convince them to vote for them for the consolation prize.

Michael, of Hyde Park on the Cap in the Short North, the swankiest restaurant located on a freeway overpass on Earth. When you visit, ask him for his family’s secret recipe Manhattan.

The last round featured Southern Comfort, pecans, Fee’s Aztec Chocolate Bitters, and apple butter! I was impressed by how decisively both guys embarked on the challenge here. Zak was yelling for eggs, while Michael crumbled pecans and tossed the large crumbs in the bitters. Both chose to rim their cocktail glasses with the apple butter. Michael embedded the pecans in the butter, while Zak dipped his in toasted coconut.
To be honest, when I saw the ingredient list, I didn’t know what to think, and had steeled myself for a strange third round. But these two drinks were the best of the night. Michael’s Apple Pecan Peach Rob Roy was a solid drink that looked and tasted great. If you had told me that single-malt and SoCo could work well together, I’d have scoffed mightily. I’d have been wrong.
But Zak’s Breakfast Before Bed was just a bit better. His float of whipped egg whites added both visual interest and some nice smoothness as well. The bitters demonstrated why they are such an important part of modern cocktailia, melding and punching up the other flavors very well.
We judges enjoyed the drinks for this last round, but not making our final decision. If one of these guys had had the grace to make a clunker in the final round, we could have kicked back and relaxed. But noooo! We had to go back through all our scratched out notes from the first two rounds and ask each other a lot of questions, when we could have been enjoying the drinks.
In the end, I think we made the right decision. This was a very strong field, with our two finalists last night both being Iron Bartender veterans.
With Cris, who won week one, that is all the Iron Bartenders we’ll have in this competition. The fourth contestant from that event, Brandon Bowsher, is the organizer of Chopped Mixology, and thus won’t be competing. (Also, he only has so many hands to nearly cut off during bartending competitions…) As I have said here before, the thing that most impresses me about Brandon is how he learns from experience. This week’s event ran faster and more smoothly than last. The crowd was larger, and Brandon and company did an even better job of keeping them involved directly in the event. It really is a great party, as well as a legitimate, interesting competition. I hope you’ll come down for the next few Mondays and join in. Cheer on your favorite bartender, or go shopping among the contestants for a new one!

The first round of the Chopped Mixology Competition is in the books, and a good time was had by all. The contestants all put together a series of great offerings, leaving a lot of difficulty for the judges. The winner of the first preliminary round, who will move on to the final on July 12th, was Cris from M at Miranova, but not without some drama along the way.

Cris Dehlavi, the first round winner, from M at Mirnova

I had not previously been to Mozaik, and I’ve got a second post about it coming next. For right now, I’ll just say that it is a swank joint, and is laid out pretty well for a contest like this one. With the walls wide open to the street, the atmosphere is wonderful. The sound system took a little while to get dialed in, but ended up working pretty well, which is both damned hard and damned important for an event like this.

Jason Davis of Mynt Ultralounge

Each night works as follows: There are three rounds of drinks created. For each round, the bartenders are presented with a sealed basket of ingredients. They must use all these ingredients to create four identical cocktails in twenty minutes, using the rest of the bar’s resources as they wish. They present their cocktails to the judges, who ask questions. After the judges have tried all the drinks, they score them according to a rubric that I’ll detail later on. The lowest scoring bartender is chopped. The remaining contestants return for the next round.

Lindsay Konkel of Haiku Poetic Food and Art

The first round was scored only to keep the format even, because the fourth contestant was a last-minute substitution. He was actually the guy who chose most of the secret ingredients earlier in the day. Under the circumstances it would have been unfair for him to keep going, a fact that was borne out by his actually being the highest scorer in the first round. The result was that Cris, who would other wise have been chopped first, stayed in the contest.

“McLovin”, Chopped’s good-natured and talented, (and unauthorized) final contestant

The final round came down to Lindsay and Cris, and ingredients included caramel macchiato ice cream and Russell’s Reserve Rye Whiskey. Both contestants put together very good offerings, and the judges required a lot of time and discussion to render their decision.

Judges (L to R): Ben Zenitsky of Columbus Monthly, Madlogic of Local Night Scene, and Amber Fox of Black Olive restaurant

Brandon revealed the judge’s decision after each round by lifting a champagne bucket to reveal the drink of the bartender who was to be chopped. The only hiccup of the night came at the final reveal, when I was not sure whether it was the winner or loser who was being exposed! Regardless, as I said at the beginning, Cris was the narrow winner, and I’m glad I didn’t have to choose this week, as Lindsay’s drink was equally good.
The next round will be Monday, June 21st, at Mozaik at 8:00PM. Come on down, have some inexpensive drinks, some great food, and cheer on next week’s batch of bartenders vying not to be… chopped!

The world of liquor is filled with contests of all sorts. Many prizes offered are lame, while others range from valuable to pretty awesome. I of course have a special affinity for the Basement Bar-centered contests, and I have covered a few past ones here. Three Olives ran a pretty amazing contest a while back called Show Us Your O-Face where the grand prize was an actual modeling contract.

Just a quick note to contest organizers: A contest like O-Face is a great way to populate your webiste with photos of hairy douchebags and/(hopefully)or cleavage!

Bombay Sapphire holds a very serious contest for professional glass artists each year in which participants attempt to create the ultimate vessel from which to swill gin.
But Bushmills has topped the lot of them.
Entitled Can You Make It At Bushmills, it works like this: You write a short essay and produce a quick video in which you outline your whiskey chops, and why you deserve to become a part of the Bushmills legend. (Hint, for best results, do not spell whisky correctly, i.e without the ‘e’!) Entries will be screened, and the best will be put up on the web for public comment.
A winner will be chosen from each of the countries where the contest is running. The winners will all be flown to Bushmills in Ireland for a three day adventure with luxury accommodations, some sight-seeing, and “Bushcamp”. In Bushcamp, the campers will undergo tests set by Master Distiller Colum Egan to demonstrate and expand their whiskey knowledge.
Sounds awesome, but that is not even the real prize!
The winner of this Masters Challenge gets to go back to Bushmills, this time for thirty days! And bring a friend. If married, you have a choice: Bring them, or update your FaceBook relationship status…. While there, you will learn about whiskey, the Bushmills way. You’ll even get to create your own custom Bushmills blend. The £5,000 you receive will either pay for a lot of golf while there, or perhaps replace some wages lost while you’ve been in Ireland being awesome.
Needless to say, I ain’t winning this one. But if you have sufficient brown liquor power, visit Bushmills FaceBook page and sign up!
(Hat Tip to Adam at Bookblogger: Taking the Pretension Out of Liquor, One Dick Joke at a Time)

Another distiller is sponsoring a home bar contest I thought you might be interested in. Grant’s Whisky is a maker of blended scotch whisky, and they are sponsoring a dual contest.
The Grant’s Home Bar Experience offers an anyone can enter sweepstakes. Simply go to the website and enter your particulars. Oh, and be a US resident over 21. The five top prizes here are hardwood bars, with other prizes including 42″ HDTVs and large mirrors for behind your bar.
The second contest, for my fellow Basement Bar owners, is a judged contest. Upload up to three photos of your cool Basement Bar setup for the judging. The winner here wins $10,000 and further, about half that in home theater equipment. I invite you to enter.
Of course, I entered too, so what good is it gonna do you? (click to enlarge)

My!
You are cocky, aren’t you?

Yes. Yes I am. But I’m pretty damn proud of my bar, so the smack-talk will continue!

If you want to follow this specific series of posts on the Pegu Blog, you can subscribe to our Basement Bar feed here. Or you can just subscribe to the entire blog, with all its brilliant content, here!
Here’s a list of the other articles in this series that have been posted so far:

• Basement Bar Accessories #10: The NewAir Portable Ice Maker
• Basement Bar Accessories #6: DIY Kegerator
• Basement Bar Accessories: Herbal Assault Part 1
• Basement Bar Design #0: Introduction
• Basement Bar Design #1: Where, What, and Why.
• Basement Bar Design #2: Refrigerators
• Basement Bar Design #3: Ice Supply
• Basement Bar Design #4(a): Essential Glassware
• Basement Bar Design #4(b): Supplemental Glassware
• Basement Bar Design #4(c): Buying Glassware
• Basement Bar Design #5: Water and Washing Up
• Basement Bar Design #6: My Own Basement Bar
• Basement Bar Design #7: Bar Top and Countertop Surfaces
• Basement Bar Design #8(a): Artists
• Basement Bar Design #8(b) More Artists
• Basement Bar Design #8: Artwork
• Basement Bar Design #9: Tiki Bars
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #1: Lit Backbar Walls
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #2: Holiday Glassware Giveaways
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #3: Beer Dispensing from Heineken and Elsewhere
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #4: Branded Beer Taps
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #5: Pure American Ingenuity
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #7: The Man Wall
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #8: The Arkeg
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #9: Global Domination
• Basement Bar Design Accessories: Hidden Lairs
• Basement Bar Design Elsewhere in the Cocktailosphere
• Basement Bar Design Elsewhere in the Cocktailosphere #2
• Basement Bar Design Factoid #1: Sheds
• Basement Bar Design Factoid #2: Dangerous Party Invitees
• Basement Bar Design Factoid #3: Irish Pub in a (really big) Box
• Basement Bar Design Factoid #4: Mr. Blendtec, activate the defenses!
• Basement Bar Design Factoid #5: 1800 Tequila’s Mancave Contest
• Basement Bar Design News: The Wall Street Journal Notices That Home Bars Are “In”
• Basement Bar Design, Things to Consider #1: The Bargain
• Basement Bar Design: A Tour of the Parade of Homes
• Basement Bar Design: Star Trek Doors
• Basement Bar Overhaul: Dressing for Tiki Month
• Bulletin, Bulletin, Bulletin!
• Christmas Idea: Martini Shaker
• Fun With Time-Lapse
• I Saved at Least $10,000 Because of Cocktail Blogging…
• Jacob Grier Invites Us to Up Our Bartending Game.
• New Basement Bar Contest From Grant’s Whisky
• New Blog Function
• SideBlog: A Really Clever, Easy IKEA Home Bar
• SideBlog: Basement Bars Are Helm’s Deep For Men
• SideBlog: Blender Drink Aficionados Booking For Europe With Spare Luggage Space
• SideBlog: Making Tiki Stuff: Royal Tiki
• SideBlog: New York Post Notices February is a Good Time For Tiki Month
• SideBlog: Selling Tiki Stuff: Cheeky Tiki
• SideBlog: The Manliest Bottle Opener Ever
• SideBlog: Ultra Modern Tiki Torches
• The Bar Accessory The EVERY Cocktail Geek Must Obtain
• The Sixth Day of Christmas
• This Year’s Final Exam: A Full-Bore Tiki Party
• Tiki Timeout: Bar Building and BlogBarCrawl Update
• Trader Tiki’s Basement Bar in the News
• Unique Tiki Mugs
• Wow, They Even Have Black Friday Sales In the Cocktail World….

First off, I recently learned that 1800 Tequila is running a contest entitled Win the Ultimate Mancave. You may enter once per 24 hour period, between now and the closure date of August 15th, 2009. I advise you to not enter, as each entry of yours will reduce my chances of winning. The grand prize is $10,000 which you can use to help you follow this humble blog’s advice on constructing the ultimate Basement Bar.
Since I already possess the Ultimate Basement Bar, I’d probably spend the cash on expensive booze, and video games. The rest of it, I’d just waste.
But I’d like to talk a bit about mancave design as exemplified in the photo atop this post. If you visit the 1800 Mancave contest website, you’ll see an expanded view, with more stuff to the right.
First off, while I’m sure 1800 would disagree, I advise against putting 600 bucks worth of their product out on display in your basement bar. 600 dollars worth of liquor is OK, but not all the same two bottles! Especially not all tequila! In my personal, limited experience, one good party that started in the mancave pictured above would end up with grass stains on everyone’s clothing, a couple of divorces, five jail terms, two of your guests waking up naked in Bozeman, Montana, and most tragically, only 35 dollars worth of 1800 on display. With that caveat, it’s a beautiful, and instructive, layout.
The liquor display shelf is beautifully backlit. There is a large refrigerator (almost an embarrassment of riches), though I quibble with the in-door ice maker, rather than a separate device. There is cool decor in the form of the memorabilia case. The sports stuff shown in the picture is actually a bit sterile (it is a promotional photo), but I like it because it is baseball heavy. If you actually has such a collection of sports stuff, and want to feature it in your Basement Bar, you might want to spread it around to permeate the whole space.
This Basement Bar also has two things I haven’t written about in detail yet, but are both in my draft que: A kicking entertainment center, and very cool lighting. Expect more from me soon on these subjects.
The place where this design falls down is the bar itself! Do not build a bar that is thigh-high, with barstools scaled for my eight-year old daughter. She’s not allowed in your bar.
So, have a good day, and remember not to enter the contest!

OK, this is kind of fun.
Three Olives is running a new promotion/contest called, What’s Your O-Face? The stated aim of the contest is to find the model that they will use in an upcoming ad campaign for the various flavors of Three Olives. You use the ad creator gadget on their site to put your face in an ad for one of Three Olives’ flavors of vodka, and it will be uploaded to their site, where visitors will rate it among all the others. The finalists will be sent to New York for a big party and a photo shoot. The winner gets to star in the ad campaign, and ten grand for their efforts.
So one of you, my loyal readers, could be the next (O) face of Three Olives Vodka.
Yes, you!
Oh, um, no. Not you.
You either.
Listen folks, by you, I mean you, one of the myriad of hot, model-quality men and women who read this blog. Not you the other, um, people.
Regardless, everyone can have fun with this. I did. You can check out my set-the-supermodel-world-on-its-head entry here. Be sure to vote for me!
Of course, while we are talking about this contest, we should examine some of the elements. First off, let’s discuss the name.

Oh yes, Doug. Please do.
Tell us all about what the O in O-Face means….
Grant us your vast and omnipresent wisdom on the subject.

Sarcastic wench.
Actually, I thought I’d take this opportunity to post this scholarly (really) discussion of the origin of the word Orgasm, without which there is no understanding of the O-Face.

Now, I have gone to the great and onerous trouble of examining a lot of entries for this contest, so I can excerpt a few to give you a taste of what you can find.
First off, few of the pictures submitted really have much resemblance to true O-Faces. This first one really doesn’t qualify. In fact, I can’t for the life of me explain why I thought I ought to waste my bandwidth with it….

This one is much more like it:

And the pictures aren’t just women, either. Why can’t a guy win for best O-Face?
This is why:

Oh, after all this, I should say a word or two about vodka, and Three Olives Vodka in particular. Since this whole O-Face exercise is intended to get people talking about and linking to them, it’d be churlish to not comply….
Three Olives is one of a select few vodkas that I look for when approaching a bar to order my fallback, a Vodka Martini. Why? It’s what I refer to as a sweet spot vodka. Vodka is a very simple beast, really. It should have no defining characteristics, beyond proof. The fewer taste elements plain vodka has, the cleaner it is. There is a direct relationship between cleanness and desirability, for me at least. There is an inverse relationship between expense and desirability. Three Olives dwells in the hammock, or sweet spot, where these lines intersect, as shown here:

Source: The Pegu Blog Institute for Economics and Vodkaology

There are other vodkas in this sweet spot as well, some of which I’ve written about, some I haven’t, and some I’ve likely never heard of. The point is, Three Olives is reliably good, reliably affordable, and reliably available, so it’s a good choice for most bars out there. This may seem a bit like damning with faint praise, but it isn’t. It’s just illustrative of how things are with vodka. There are brands out there that cost twice what Three Olives does. In no way are they worth anything like twice as much. For most people, they won’t be worth a dime more if they can’t see the lable. Just facts, folks. A good vodka is definitely worth the added expense over a mediocre vodka, but a super-premium vodka is not worth the added expense over a good one.
This illustrates the difficulty for the vodka industry these days. How do you distinguish your product, when it shouldn’t be distinguishable once it reaches a certain threshold of quality?
Three Olives’ answer is to focus on flavored vodkas. They offer the widest array of flavored/infused vodkas (14) I’ve seen on the market today, and I think that they are wise to go this way. Once you start flavoring vodkas, quality reappears in comparing your product to competitors. It puts both character and originality back into play, which, for a quality manufacturer, is fertile ground to gain market share. Also, a selection of these bottles makes for an attractive and eye-catching display either behind a bar or on a liquor store shelf. Some of their flavors would be of use to me (vanilla), some escape my understanding (triple shot espresso).
And for all you anti-vodka snobs out there, especially those who turn up their nose at flavored vodkas as beneath you, what are you going to do when Three Olives (or perhaps someone else small enough to take a gamble on being puckish) puts out a Juniper-Infused Vodka? Hmmm? Oh wait, don’t Beefeater and Bombay already do that?

Hey!
You are not done, you know.

What? This is pretty damn long already, especially for a post about funny faces selling vodka.

Listen.
Where is the recipe?

Oh come on. Do I have to? There is only one that’s appropriate for this post, you know.

I know. But it has to be done.
The International Guild of Boozeblogging’s latest standards circular (Required Elements for Certified Liquor Blog Entries, ed. 2009, rev.3) states that all product posts must include a recipe to establish the bona-fides of the blogger.
Now do it. You know the one.

Sigh. I suppose I should include a quick recipe here at the end. After all, it does seem appropriate for this post.

Finally, as a public service, I include a classic (and I do mean classic) instructional video to help you understand the nuances of constructing this drink.

Well it’s iPhone-a-palooza week hereabouts, I guess. First, I reviewed Jimmy Patrick’s 101 Cocktails, then I began my contest to discover the next Killer Feature for iPhone cocktail apps. Now I’m going to go over Gary and Mardee Regan’s Flip ‘N Drink. (Web page on Ardent Spirits here)
Flip ‘N Drink is the latest in the starting-to-be-crowded field of general cocktail reference apps for the iPhone. And at $3.99 US (not metric Euros), it’s the second most expensive one I’ve found, after the mighty and venerable Cocktails+. Is it worth it? That of course depends on you, but there a couple of reasons to think it is.
The first question to always ask concerning any reference app, especially as relates to cocktails, is about the database. There are zillions of drinks out there, most of them bad. Lots of bad drinks clutter up the reference and make it hard to use. Flip ‘N Drink’s database is large, but edited with care to cull out the crap. I doubt there is a recipe for the Pink Panty Pulldown in there! (OK, I just checked. Nope. Alas, they did cave and include an Appletini. Don’t they know it’s dead?) There will be plenty of recipes in there that you won’t like. Yeah you, the guy in the suit. And you won’t like a bunch either, lady. But the one’s you guys hate won’t likely be the same. The point is that the stupid drinks are absent, the good drinks have very good recipes for them. It’s a good database.

Pretty assertive there, Reviewer Boy.
Have you read all those recipes, or something?

Or something. Here’s the other thing about the database: Its pedigree. Did I mention it comes from Gary and Mardee Regan? They’ve ensured you get all the classic oeuvre. And they collect tons of originals from some of the world’s best master bartenders, plus Junior Merino!
So the database is both large and good. If you are looking for a full reference app, you’ll likely have a hard time finding a better one.
Like many apps, Flip ‘N Drink has a photograph of each cocktail, and the photography is also top notch. I am continuously amazed at the quality of photography to be found in some iPhone apps that sell for just a couple of bucks. I particularly like these photos though. They are gorgeous, and if you remember this blog’s old look, or you’ve seen my business’s website, you know I’m a sucker for black backgrounds.

The last major consideration for an app like this is the interface. Flip ‘N Drink’s is pretty well thought out and executed. It does have some hiccups that need to be dealt with in the first update, however. The first view, labeled Flip ‘N is just a photo of each drink. You can flick left and right to page through them all in alphabetical order, or tap to flip the picture, revealing the ingredients and instructions, as well as two buttons that I’ll get to below. Flicking through the pics is a gorgeous experience, but in a database this size, it’s not very functional.
The second tab is search, which lets you search by name or ingredients. The search is a live search, which I love. This means that the list of results updates with each key you type, giving a continuously narrowing result. But you have to actively dismiss the text entry box to do anything with the results in some instances. When you do choose a drink, it goes to the flipped page for that drink, with info and feature buttons. This is great, but you can’t then flip the picture back to the plain picture. Nor can you start flicking through the alphabetical database from there! Please fix this, guys! This bug/design flaw does nothing to diminish the usefulness of the app, just the fun of using it and the value from those lovely pictures. It should be an easy fix, so I doubt it will be long off. The next tab is My Bar, which is nothing more than a page listing the cocktails you have marked as favorites. The last tab is Info, which is a simple, concise instructions page that is a very nice feature in and of itself.
The last thing to look at in iPhone apps is the special features it may have. As I mentioned at the top, I’m running a contest this month to see who can suggest the next cool thing to add to a cocktail app in the future. Pay attention, developers!
Flip ‘N Drink has two, cool, special features that are accessed from the flip page of each drink, as I alluded to before. One button sends you to another drink that you might like if you like the drink that’s featured here. This is neat, though I can think of one possible enhancement I won’t mention here yet, to keep someone from using it as a contest entry. The second feature is the really cool one though, and it must have taken forever to compile. It’s found through this button:

Cocktailian Conversations are unique little bits of trivia or history that relate back to the drink, and there is something for each and every drink in the database. Now, that’s fun there, I don’t care who you are. And if you use truthful nuggets that way I do in a bar conversation, you might as well relabel it the “Blarney Button”, or “Cliff Clavin Speaks”.
So that’s Flip ‘N Drink. To come full circle, the $3.99 price tag is just above the line where I suspect most people start to hesitate before buying an iPhone app. There are apps that do the same thing for free. Is Flip ‘N Drink worth it? I think so. The database looks to be, and has reason to be, as good as it gets. The app looks lovely. The interface will be super with just a few, easy updates. (Like how I’m announcing what you’ll be doing for you, guys?) It has cool extra features, one of which is original and awesome. If any app is going to be worth four bucks to you, I suspect this one is it.

Here’s a list of the other posts here about Apple iPhone software:

• iPhone App From CocktailDB: Cocktails
• iPhone Cocktail Directories
• iPhone App: Pocket Cocktails
• Pocket Cocktails Update
• iPhone Software Review: Are You Smarter Than a Bartender?
• iPhone App From Cocktail Dreams: Cocktails App
• iPhone App: 101 Cocktails
• iPhone Cocktail Apps Contest!
• iPhone App: Flip ‘N Drink
• iPhone App: Cocktails Made Easy
• iPhone Cocktail App: Cocktails+ is Free!
• The Corporate World Starts Getting In On iPhone Drink Apps
• iPhone App Review: Tiki+
• Alcohol and FaceBook Don’t Mix, Without This Emulsifier…
• TabbedOut: A Marvelous App
• Update: Beachbum Berry’s Tiki+