Even with the 10 years of bartending behind me, every once in a while I get stumped. When searching iTunes for the right app for you, you’ll come across hundred’s of them. Below are the handful of apps that help me out on a busy night. These apps are all the same in the sense that they have a certain amount of drink recipes in their respective database. Some have a little more functionality than others, but all you really need is speed and accurate drink recipes with a good search function.

The first one at top left is a free app that’s actually called Drinks and Cocktails, and is usually the first app I turn to. This app is extremely fast loading and has a few hundred recipes of the most popular cocktails.

DrinksFree, Drinks Pro, Mixology, and Cocktails are basically the same with a fairly large database of drinks, but the load time is a little slower.

iVideo Cocktails is a great app because it uses high quality, professionally made videos (within the app) to show how to make certain drinks. This database is limited to about 50 cocktails but the recipes are extremely accurate and authentic. This app is for the more experienced bartender because it does not give you measurements. You’ll need alot of downtime to browse through this one.

Drinkspiration is proprietary app by Absolut that features some great alternative ways to make some of the most popular cocktails using the infused line of Absolut Vodka. This app also features a few hundred drink recipes.

There’s no reason to spend more than a couple of bucks on these types of apps, they’re all fairly similar in regard to functionality. Like I mentioned before, the main differences are speed and the size of the drink database. Let me know which are your favorites in the comments.