The biggest cocktail app on the App Store, and what Barello does differently

The wine sits in the same household inventory as the spirits, so the shelf that says what cocktail you can make also says which bottle of wine is ready tonight.

Every wine carries a drinking window that adjusts for where you keep it: a kitchen shelf runs faster than a fridge, and the dates move to match.

Vermouth, aperitifs and liqueurs fade once they're open. Barello notes when one's been open long enough to taste before you pour it neat.

Give a bottle a price and a size and it works out what a nip costs, so a sip-it spirit and a mix-it ingredient sit on the same list, priced.

It's one shelf the whole household shares. It's free to use. Here's what joining early gets you.

Cocktail Flow has 1,436 ratings in the Australian App Store and 2,618 in the British one, more than any other cocktail app on either. It's been live since January 2012, longer than most of the category.

Full access to 300+ Premium recipes, in Cocktail Flow's own words, beyond what the free tier holds. Plus the ability to add your own cocktails and keep them in the app, and Cocktail Notes: a place to save a tweak against any recipe so it's there next time.

That's recipe content and a place to keep your own additions to it. Nothing on the upgrade screen mentions tracking what's in your house or matching a recipe to it.

A library that's been growing since 2012, and a real way to build on it: your own recipes sit alongside theirs, with notes attached. If what you want is a personal cocktail book with a long-running library behind it, that's a fair reason to pay for it. It isn't the job Barello does.

There's no browsable library and no social feed. Barello matches recipes against the bottles you tell it you own; it isn't a book of cocktails to read for its own sake. If that's what you want, Cocktail Flow is built for it.