Bevnap: Cocktail Recipes

I am a long-time fan of Jeffrey Morganthaler—I give out his classic eggnog every year around the holidays by the quart—so I was enthused to hear that he had partnered with someone to make a cocktail recipe app. I’ve tried a bunch of them and many are good, but I’ve yet to find one that is truly great. I had (and still have) high hopes for Bevnap. My first (and primary) complaint: why on earth does this app require 1.7GB of space on my device? It’s a recipe database. Recipes are mostly text. I’m no expert, but text is pretty compressible. I know the app has other features—the calculators are pretty cool—but at the end of the day the primary function is to display text and a few pictures. There is no way this app should take up more space than almost every other app on my iPhone. I suspect that the developers used Electron rather than AppKit/SwiftUI. The result is bloated app that takes up way more space than it should. Second, the interface itself doesn’t render particularly well on my iPhone 15 Pro. While the recipe cards themselves are beautiful, there are lots of idiosyncrasies and places where data is truncated to “fit it all in” to a certain amount of screen real estate. For example, the “Select” button text wraps to two lines on my display. Assuming my assumption about Electron is correct, this may be a by-product… Electron is not known for producing beautiful, functional apps. Please use native frameworks! Third, while the recipes are great, I don’t always agree with the measurements as listed. For example, I like to make my Boulevardier with a bit more bourbon rather than the classic 3 equal parts Negroni riff. I also like to add orange bitters to my Old Fashioned. It would be great if there were a way to add notes to an imported recipe card for custom preferences, or to modify an imported recipe while preserving the original. Finally, some ability to import recipes would be really useful. If Bevnap is going to be my “one true cocktail app” I need a way to get recipes into the app that doesn’t involve typing them in manually to my phone. The gold standard would be the ability import from a website, or perhaps to automate the copy and paste process so that HTML text grabbed from Safari is imported as plain text. Even better would be an import feature that lets you add a recipe automatically from a URL, PDF, or rich text file. Bevnap does many things well and has a lot of potential. I also love that it does not collect my data in an attempt to monetize it. I was more than happy to pay $5 to support developers doing something cool. Shrink the app size, add some UI polish and a few additional features, and you’ll have something truly special.

This is really very good cocktail database tool. Have messed around with a few others over the years and in the end just created my own using Evernote. This has tons of flexibility for customizations, searching for things multiple different ways. And best of all the developers are highly responsive to feedback and improving a product. Definitely recommend.