New App Mixes New Drinks With What You Have 127
Pickens writes "The magic of a new app called 'Top Shelf' is that if you want to mix a new drink, the app thinks the way most of us do — instead of going out to buy the ingredients, it shows you how to build a new drink with the ingredients you have available. Feeling indecisive? Let Top Shelf pick a random recipe for you. You can get a random drink from the entire database, a specific category, your favorites, search results, or the liquor cabinet."
Re:Not a new app (Score:5, Insightful)
My girlfriend has an app called Mixologist that does the same damn thing. List of ingredients in, list of possible drinks out. Big deal.
I don't mind slashvertisments when they're something new or innovative, but this one is neither. Bleh.
Re:Doesn't everyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
First off, would it really kill an editor (or god forbid, a submitter) to google something first to see if it really is a new idea? The College Bar database has been doing this for years, and I know it's not the first.
Which brings me to why I replied to this post - no. There are certain ingredients that play off each other well, and those which don't.
The biggest problem with the default College Bar database was that it was full of garbage just like you're proposing - "hey, put this in and this in and this in and give it a funny name" that someone submitted after they "invented it" in their dorm room. Many of these so-called drinks were useless crap you'd never want to drink, and had the gimmick of weird ingredients, easy ingredients, many ingredients, a stupid name, and/or some "stunt" involved.
While you are certainly welcome to mix Midori, Limoncello, Pepto Bismol, Jagermeister, Faygo Red Pop and Bailey's into a glass and call it a drink, the fact is that nobody over 25 or with any taste whatsoever gives a shit about your nasty frat boy drink. There's a reason why only 20-something girls who are desperate for attention consume drinks with "sexy" names like Blowjobs, Sex on the Beach, or a Slippery Bald Beaver. These are drinks for little whores, not adults.
This isn't to say people have to agree about what constitutes a good drink - I prefer a martini shaken, not stirred, but if it has anything other than gin, vermouth, and some sort of garnish in it (and possibly a bit of bitters if you're trying to re-invent the wheel), don't call it a martini. Note I didn't say don't drink it, I'm just sick of "martini" drinks like choclatetini and appletini which are the exact opposite of what a martini actually is, sweet versus dry, syrupy instead of thin, etc. I also want no part of anything with Kahluah in it, but other reasonable people may thoroughly enjoy a White Russian.
The first thing I had to do was delete all the frat, gimmick, and whore drinks from the College Bar. Eventually, I just populated College Bar with my own database from a well-loved cocktail book that I had lying around. It was useful when you wanted to try something you hadn't had before, hadn't considered the possibilities of a particular ingredient, but didn't want to resort to awful crap you get when college kids make "drinks" whose primary goal is to taste like Coca Cola, fruit juice, or the sort of get-drunk-immediately swill created by people who consider Bacardi shots an actual drink instead of a stunt.