I am a bartender, so I am always on the lookout for helpful bartending resources. Drink Pro and Party Pro Lite are just two of a number of available iPhone apps that provide you with drink recipes.

I am not fond of massive bartending books, or in this case, massive bartending apps. That said, everyone needs a trusty resource when they want to look up a recipe.

Critical point: Drink Pro will NOT help people make drinks accurately. It looks to me like the creators of Drink Pro, Helmes Innovations, let anyone and everyone add recipes to their database of 20,000+ drink recipes.

When I searched for a Cosmopolitan recipe, I got two choices: # Drinks and C Drinks. I clicked on C Drinks only to find a long, unalphabetized list of every drink that started with C. I re-entered my search term after I opened the C page and Drink Pro gave me twelve Cosmopolitan recipes, filled with misspellings, inaccuracies and ingredients that do not even exist. I would not be confident ordering a drink from a bartender who uses Drink Pro.

I took a quick peek at some free drink recipe apps, 5800+ Drink and Cocktail Recipes Free and Dream Cocktail Lite, to see how they compared to Drink Pro. They were worse. 5800+ had an awkward, slow interface and similarly inaccurate cocktails. Dream Cocktail Lite was light, with only a few dozen recipes.

Then I found Party Pro Lite. Party Pro is an app that is also made by Helmes Innovations, and it appears to be the exact same app as Drink Pro, but with a different name. Party Pro Lite is the free version, with 7000+ drink recipes. That’s enough to keep me busy. It even has the exact same twelve (inaccurate) Cosmopolitan recipes as Drink Pro. Party Pro Lite also has many of the other features that Drink Pro offers: a unit converter, general bartending information and a link to Google Maps that functions as a bar locater.

This is an easy decision. Until something better and more accurate comes along, skip Drink Pro and just download the free Party Pro Lite. You can also check out weDrink for a recipe app based on the ingredients you have in your house, and if you want to spend a bit more, HappyHour is an option.

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category: Drinking, Lifestyle, Round-Up