Personally, I enjoy making cocktails by hand. I have a little notebook where I write down my recipes, a whole drawer of gadgets and shakers to help me get all the ingredients just right, and an entire cupboard cabinet of mixers ready and waiting for whatever my heart would desire. But for the average person (who doesn’t run a blog dedicated to alcohol), that’s a heavy investment in equipment and materials to make for a drink you might only make once or twice a month. What if, instead of needing all of that, you simply make a one-time investment in a machine that can create a perfect cocktail at the push of a button? That’s exactly the line of thinking that led to the product we are reviewing today: The Bartesian Cocktail Maker.
This is a trend that the alcohol industry identified a few years ago, and which has been increasing over time, and the alcohol industry has tried to address it with the “Ready to Drink” (or RTD) cocktail category. Canned or bottled cocktails that can simply be poured out into a glass or consumed directly from the can. This umbrella includes White Claws, Twisted Tea, and other similar brands trying to make the experience of enjoying a spirits-based drink as easy and effortless as cracking open a cold beer.
While RTD products are one good solution, they are quite limiting. There’s no ability to swap out the liquor for a brand of your preference, and you can’t adjust the strength of the resulting drink. There’s also a limitation on the varieties of cocktails and drinks you can find, with most RTD beverages trending in the seltzer or spritz direction and not many in the “dark and brooding old fashioned” kind of direction.
The Bartesian has positioned itself to address all of these issues for the average casual cocktail drinker.
- Cocktails are ready nearly instantly, with no need to look up a recipe or take the time to prepare ingredients.
- No additional tools are required; you simply place the glass under the spout, press a button, and wait 30 seconds.
- No need to maintain a large collection of mixers, everything you need is provided in simple single use pods.
It sounds almost too good to be true. So when one of my family members purchased one, I was excited to be along for the ride as they tried it out for the first time.
The unboxing experience was fine — everything came packaged neatly in the single box, with a set of instructions and a series of glass vials for your alcohol. All of the parts were cradled in Styrofoam, to the point where I wouldn’t be concerned about this breaking in transit if you purchased it from somewhere like amazon.
Assembly took about five minutes, with a little more time spent cleaning out the glass vials and prepping the machine for its first run.
There are three consumable components in this system, all of which combine together to make your cocktail.
The most obvious component is the alcohol itself — four stations around the base of the machine are designed to accept and hold vials of liquor, specifically white rum, whiskey, vodka, tequila, and gin. (You may notice that I mentioned five spirits for four holes, and that’s because the gin and rum need to be swapped out depending on what you are making and share a single receptacle.)
Around the back, you have a reservoir for water that needs to be kept filled. This is used to help dilute the spirits and mixers (which we’ll talk about in a second) — but an important note to heed is that water is at room temperature. In fact, just about everything is at room temperature, which means adding some ice to the glass is an important step before dispensing the drink.
The final component is the one that will be the most difficult to keep stocked, and that’s the individual pods for each cocktail. These pods contain all the mixers you need for each cocktail, and slot into the front of the machine just like a Keurig coffee maker. Each pod has a barcode on it that tells the machine what cocktail is being requested, which allows it to select the correct spirit and the correct proportions for that specific drink.
The pods bring me to my biggest question or concern about the whole operation.
Generally speaking the device feels well constructed and looks good on your counter, but the process for inserting the pods isn’t nearly as confidence inducing as the Keurig or Nespresso for example. In those machines typically there’s a “double throw” kind of mechanism where you close the lid and then pull a lever to pierce the pod, or where the lever is a separate metal mechanism that feels solid and satisfying to engage.
Instead, in this case, the metal ring around the front of the machine appears to be solid and permanently affixed to the articulating top of the machine which opens to accept the pod. Combined with the fact that the mechanism is cantilevered over the bar mat to pour directly into your drink, it felt to me like it wasn’t as solid as I would have hoped. I felt like I was going to break it when I was closing the lid on a new pod.
That said, I didn’t break it, and it worked fine while I was using it.
Now let’s focus on the pods a little bit more, since these items are non-alcoholic you can buy them directly on amazon.com and have them shipped to your house. Super convenient in my opinion, and the fact that each one is an individually sealed container means there’s less of a chance of your mixers going bad before you can use them in cocktails.
Bartesian recommends that you keep these in a refrigerator — less so for maintaining the freshness than for remediating the issue I mentioned before about how everything is at room temperature; cold mixers will help chill the cocktail even before it hits the ice.
Once all the parts are assembled, the vials are filled, the water is topped off, and the pod is inserted, all that is left to do is press the button and wait for your cocktail to be dispensed. It takes less than 30 seconds, and the results are pretty hard to argue with.
Bottom line up front: what you get is an above average tasting cocktail.
Compared to a hand-crafted cocktail made with premium ingredients and the perfect proportions that have been carefully adjusted over time, I’ll take the handmade version any day.
But those take time, and effort, and money, and tools to make. And sometimes I just want to grab an old fashioned and sit down after a long day, and getting the “perfect” version isn’t necessarily the point. All of the cocktails we tried were tasty, well balanced, and (most importantly) ridiculously easy to make.
Conclusion
I think the Bartesian Cocktail Maker is a product that understands their market and is directly addressing one of the biggest challenges in enjoying a cocktail at home. It’s an automated bartender where all you need to do is keep the pods in stock and get a couple bottles of your favorite spirits and then, at the press of a button, you can instantly get whatever cocktail you desire. No mess, no cleanup, no effort required.
Likely you’ll get most of the cocktail purists to turn up their noses at the mere idea of this machine and declare that they can make a better version — and they are right. The resulting cocktails are about the level of quality that I’d expect from your average Applebee’s. They aren’t spectacular by any means, but they are good quality, easily made, instantly available, and you didn’t have to leave your house to get one.
I don’t think this is a product for me specifically, because I already invested in the mixers and the tools and the experience to make fantastic cocktails on demand. But for someone who just wants to unwind with a delicious margarita at the end of the day without having to do any extra work, this will absolutely scratch that itch and do it well.
The Bartesian Cocktail Maker
Price: $369.99 (currently on sale for $299)
Buy the System: amazon.com
Pods: amazon.com
Overall Rating: 4/5
A solid choice for those who want the convenience of freshly made cocktails in their own home without the mess and the annoyance that comes with making them the manual way.