Is There an Untappd for Cocktails?
Beer drinkers have had their check-in app for years. Cocktails deserve the same, for the ones you order out and the ones you build at home.
Yes. Drinqly is the Untappd for cocktails. You check in a cocktail, rate it, add a photo and a tasting note, and it lands in a searchable journal, whether you had it at a bar or made it at home. Recipe and inventory apps go deep on building drinks from the bottles on your shelf; Drinqly keeps a record of the ones you actually drank, alongside every other drink you enjoy.
Drinqly is a free download for iPhone.
Get Drinqly on the App StoreThe best cocktail I keep coming back to is a lavender martini from Yard House (yes, a chain restaurant, don't knock it until you try it). I couldn't tell you what they use for the lavender, but between that, the garnish, and the barely-there ice that leaves it almost frosted, it has outlasted drinks from bars ten times as serious. I haven't even had one in over two years and I can still taste it. That's the strange thing about cocktails. The one that stays with you is almost never the one you had just last weekend, it's the most unsuspecting one that you order only once in a blue moon.
Search for an "Untappd for cocktails" and you mostly turn up apps for making them: what to build from the bottles on your shelf, recipe libraries, inventory trackers. Handy if mixing is your hobby, but none of it helps with a drink someone else made that you want to find again three weeks later, which is the moment I keep landing in. Untappd closed that gap for beer years ago. For cocktails, that's Drinqly.
Two kinds of cocktail app
The phrase "cocktail app" hides two jobs that barely touch, and knowing which one you're after saves a lot of installing and deleting.
Apps for making cocktails
Tools like Mixel and MixMate live on the production side. They track the bottles you own, suggest what you can build, store recipes. If you're a home bartender working on your technique, that's the shelf you want. The catch is that these apps are built for the version of you who plans ahead. Nobody logs the Negroni they actually drank into a recipe manager the next morning.
Apps for remembering cocktails
This is the Untappd side, and it's what most people typing "Untappd for cocktails" are after. You had a drink. It floored you. You'd like to have it again someday and need somewhere to put that so it survives past closing time. In Drinqly you check the cocktail in, rate it, and keep it somewhere searchable. The Oaxaca Old Fashioned at that little corner bar lands next to everything else you've logged, name and venue attached.
| If you want to… | Recipe / inventory apps | Drinqly |
|---|---|---|
| Remember cocktails you drank | Not the focus | The whole point |
| Log ones you had at a bar | Rarely | Yes, with the venue |
| Rate & photograph a drink | Sometimes | Every check-in |
| See friends' pours | No | Friends + worldwide feed |
| Find good drinks nearby | No | Venue discovery |
| Keep wine, spirits & coffee too | No | Same journal |
None of this makes the recipe apps worse at their job. Suggesting builds and tracking a shelf are real strengths, and a fair comparison says so. The table above just sorts which app answers which question.
The cocktails you had out
This is where a check-in app earns its keep. You're at a bar, the bartender hands you something you'd never have ordered, and it's extraordinary. A recipe app has no slot for that moment. In Drinqly you check the drink in against the venue, give it a rating, and it takes about ten seconds. Months later you can pull up exactly what it was and where to get it again. The social layer that made Untappd fun at a taproom comes along too, seeing friends' pours and sharing your own, plus a worldwide feed of what people are drinking everywhere. If you're the one behind the bar rather than in front of it, claiming your venue is free and shows you which of those check-ins are happening at your own tables.
And it's not only cocktails
Here's the other half of it. You don't only drink cocktails. There's the Friday Negroni, the Sunday glass of wine, the neat whiskey after a long day, the Monday flat white. Different drinks, different weeks. In a cocktail-only app all of that has to live somewhere else, in three more apps you forget to open. Drinqly keeps them on one timeline, so the Oaxaca Old Fashioned sits a scroll away from the espresso. If that's the part you care about, the fuller version is over on the Untappd for everything you drink.
Common questions
Is there an Untappd for cocktails?
What is the best app to log cocktails you have tried?
How is Drinqly different from recipe apps like Mixel or MixMate?
Can I log cocktails I had at a bar?
Is there a cocktail app with a social feed?
