Stirred Art: Mixology & Bars

You've had hundreds of cocktails and still order the same three. Photograph any bar menu and Stirred Art ranks every drink by how much you'll like it, with the reason, even offline.

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You've had hundreds of cocktails. You still order the same three. Photograph any cocktail menu, in any bar, and Stirred Art ranks every drink on it by how much you, specifically, will like it, with the reason next to each one. It works offline, from a taste profile that lives on your phone.

The problem. Cocktail menus list names and ingredients, not tastes. Faced with twenty drinks they've never heard of, most people fall back on the same Negroni or Espresso Martini, and the bartender's best work goes unordered. At home it's the reverse: a shelf of bottles and no idea what you can make with them, or which friend can't have nuts.

The job Stirred Art does. When a bartender hands me a menu of drinks I've never heard of, tell me which one I'll love. At home, tell me what I can make tonight with what's on my shelf.

Who it's for. Cocktail lovers who want to order with confidence, people who host friends at home, and anyone who travels and wants to walk into a new bar and still order well.

Inspiration

The Stirred Art started as a tiny London bar. We made its menus for years and ran pop-ups in London, Edinburgh, Toronto and Vancouver.

On the other side of the bar I kept failing at something simple: remembering what I liked. My notes app filled up with "negroni but smokier??" and "the thing at the place with the fig". I was recording names, and a name is the least useful fact about a drink. What I liked was a kind of flavour, and I had no way to describe it. I wanted to be a regular everywhere: walk into a bar I'd never been to and still order well.

What it does

  • Learns your palate. Pick a few drinks you'd order and Stirred Art builds your taste profile across 11 flavour dimensions, from bitter and smoky to sweet and sour. Every drink you rate refines it.
  • Reads the menu for you. Photograph a bar's menu and every drink is ranked by how well it fits you, with the reason ("You'll enjoy the herbal and bitter").
  • Recognises a drink. Point the camera at a glass and it identifies what you're holding from the glass, garnish and colour.
  • Keeps the night. A running tab, bill splitting, a receipt check and the bartender's name, all in one visit.
  • Knows your home bar. Add your bottles and see what you can make tonight, what you're one bottle short of, and what to swap in.
  • Remembers your friends. Guest profiles keep what each friend drinks and what they can't, allergies included.
  • Finds drinks you forgot to log in your camera roll.
  • Works offline, with 5,096 cocktails and 3,238 ingredients on the phone.

How I built it

I built Stirred Art alone. The taste profile, the menu reading and the drink recognition all run on the iPhone, so it works in a basement bar with no signal and your drinking history stays yours. Every glass, drink and garnish in the app is drawn in code rather than photographed. RevenueCat runs the subscriptions.

Challenges I ran into

  • Real menus are messy. Two columns, script fonts, prices in odd places, photos taken by candlelight. Stirred Art tries three different ways to read a menu before it gives up, and a collection of real menu photos catches anything that breaks.
  • Keeping AI out of the ranking. The built-in concierge uses Apple Intelligence to explain drinks, but it never ranks them. Scores come from your taste profile, so the same menu always gets the same order, and friends' names and allergies never reach the AI.
  • A redesign that went wrong. Midway through, a colour change was pushed through 152 files by find-and-replace, and nobody checked the screens. The bars section disappeared. I rolled it back, wrote a spec and redesigned screen by screen.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • A photo of a menu becomes a ranked list with a reason next to every drink, offline.
  • Not one of the 5,096 cocktails in the catalogue is a photo; every one is drawn.

What I learned

A cocktail book can tell you a drink is balanced. It can't tell you whether you'll enjoy it. That second half, knowing the drinker, is the product.

What's next

Bars. Stirred Art can already show a bar's events and offers without an app update. Next is opening that up to the bars themselves.

Built With

  • activitykit
  • app-intents
  • cloudkit
  • coreml
  • foundation-models
  • metal
  • revenuecat
  • swift
  • swiftdata
  • swiftui
  • the-composable-architecture
  • vision
  • widgetkit
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