There’s no shortage of apps out there for whiskey fans. The tricky part is trying to find one that does everything you want and need. Whether you’re looking for shopping links, ratings, inventory management, discovery or more, we’ve made a list of the best whiskey apps to help you decide.
Distiller
Audience: All Levels of Spirits Pursuers
Platforms: iOS, Google Play, Web
Free Feature Highlights: custom lists; news and educational articles; comprehensive reviews with flavor tags, images, location and price
Paid Tier Highlights: flavor search; removes ads; enhanced lists; content export; premium news and articles
There’s a reason Distiller has been the industry leader in the whiskey app space for over 10 years. It’s easy to use, has a huge feature set, and a really dense database of human-verified information. Whiskey newcomers will appreciate the large amount of educational articles and detailed descriptions and expert reviews (including visual flavor profile graphs) accompanying spirits listings. Casual imbibers will enjoy curating custom lists from a database of more than 50,000 spirits, each with highlighted flavor tags and star ratings averaged from millions of user reviews. Expert whiskey fans will appreciate weekly new spirits release news and comprehensive reviewing including location, price, image uploads and flavors. Premium paid subscribers, called Distiller Pro users, gain access to even more functionality and content including first looks at upcoming releases, the ability to search by flavor, unlimited access to bottle scanning, custom list upgrades, content exports and more. Distiller is well-maintained and updated daily by real humans so you can always be first for new release news, spirits community updates, and a constant stream of new and exciting features.
WhiskeySearcher
Audience: Spirits (mainly whiskey) Shoppers
Platforms: iOS, Google Play
Free Feature Highlights: location-based pricing and shop links; in-depth spirits style and region information; price history analytics
Paid Tier Highlights: view shopping results for all stores; see results in two currencies; calculate the value of your collection; access to WineSearcher Pro
WhiskeySearcher is the child of WineSearcher and is best suited for people who are looking to purchase. Spirits pages showcase pricing and shop links, and a paid tier allows for price comparisons and demand history. While still allowing for user ratings, the only function for saving bottles is a single wishlist.
WhiskyBase
Audience: Whisky Nerds
Platforms: iOS, Google Play, Web
Free Feature Highlights: large spirits database; add-your-own whisky form; shop and price links
Paid Tier Highlights: collection photo uploads; price alerts; exclusive community perks
If you’re a hardcore whiskey fan, you’ve no doubt heard of WhiskyBase. As far as pure size, WhiskyBase might have the most extensive database of pages, though for more popular releases there are pages and pages of results which can make searching and navigating the database pretty difficult. Still, if you’re looking for a very specific whiskey that you aren’t likely to find in any store within 100 miles of you, WhiskyBase probably has a page on it. Their spirits pages don’t offer much expanded data for whisky novices to learn from, but pros may appreciate the bottling dates, district/region listings and series type highlights. Ratings are also straightforward 1-100 and a box for written text. Though we should mention their main product is the website, and the app itself doesn’t seem to get updated often.
OnlyDrams
Audience: Whiskey Collectors
Platforms: iOS, Google Play
Free Feature Highlights: comprehensive collection tracking including bottle quantities and fill level; collection breakdown data; collection randomizer tool to “pick my pour”
Paid Tier Highlights: monthly paid tiers enter users into an allocated bottle raffle
OnlyDrams is an app-only tool for the overtly geeky whiskey collectors. Your homepage displays data relevant to your current collection including current bottles, collection value, your reviews and favorites. Those with large collections will enjoy the breakdown which shows how how rare your bottles are in a rank from common to impossible. Since it’s still quite new, there aren’t many users leaving tasting notes in the app yet, but maybe in time it will carve out a space for itself.
BoozApp
Audience: Frugal Whiskey Shoppers
Platforms: iOS, Google Play
Free Feature Highlights: fair price voting; adding bottles to your “bar” or wishlist; MSRP to shelf price comparison
Paid Tier Highlights: no paid tier
BoozApp has been around for a couple of years and is focused singularly on bottle pricing in the whiskey and distilled spirits space. This is helpful for folks who are trying to find a specific highly-sought-after bottle and need to know what a fair price is. As a user you can search for a bottling and then vote on whether the shelf price is fair compared to the MSRP. While you can’t read or leave public reviews, you can add a bottle to your “bar” which allows you to denote how much is left, the price you paid and when, and add some notes. The price of bottles can vary so much from store-to-store and city-to-city, so if you’re all about hunting for the best price on a particular bottle, this is a great app to add to your drinks folder.
Your Perfect Whiskey App Pairing
While most of the apps listed above aim to be complete platforms for all of your needs, we think keeping an arsenal of the best whiskey apps at your disposal is the optimal decision. We suggest picking one or two of the aforementioned apps and pairing them with some more singularly-focused platforms.
Our favorites include Flasky, the AI-based spirits chatbot from Distiller. Flasky has access to Distiller’s massive spirits database and can answer questions about flavor profiles, suggest tasting flights, compare bottles, help you with pricing and product availibility and even pick the perfect gift for your spirits-loving friends.
If cocktails are more your style, GlassEye is a smart cocktail creation app that works by simply snapping a photo of the spirits and mixers you have on hand. GlassEye will then craft you the perfect cocktail recipe, and if not you can re-roll and try again.
The world of whiskey apps is just as vast as the world of whiskey itself, so don’t hesitate sampling a few before finding your perfect pairing.
