I had sort of an anti-New Year’s resolution this year: drink more alcohol!

Well, not exactly. What I resolved to do was to learn how to make cocktails at home. Until now, my homemade adult beverages consisted mainly of Seven & Sevens or the occasional Moscow Mule. But sampling a wide range of other cocktails on our cruise last year, plus tasting my brother-in-law’s homemade limoncello over Christmas encouraged me to learn a little mixology myself.

After stocking my home bar with the basics (vodka, gin, tequila, rum, whiskey, etc. etc.) and mixers (simple syrup, lemon/lime juice, etc. etc.), I needed recipes. There’s no shortage of web sites on the internet (like liquor.com) for cocktail recipes, but I also wanted a good mobile app for my iPhone. After trying a few, I found Mixel.

Mixel doesn’t just tell you how to make cocktails. If you stock your bar and fridge with the ingredients you have on-hand, it will tell you what you can make as well. You can search recipes by name (“whiskey sour”) or ingredient (“grenadine”) and filter the results by ingredients you have on hand, different packs, drinks you’ve tried or bookmarked, etc. The app has about 500 built-in ingredients and you can easily add your own. It’s a lot of tapping, but you can add the ingredients, measurements, steps, notes, even customize the icon (glass type, liquid color, garnishes, etc.). You can also add and organize your own recipes into packs and even add multiple bars (I guess if you have one at home and one at the summer house?). If you don’t have an ingredient, you can add it to your shopping list (although that’s a list internal to the app and doesn’t integrate with any grocery shopping apps).

As you might have guessed, it’s called Mixel because of the pixel art graphics which take me back to my King’s Quest days. You can change the color scheme and turn off the pixel font if you want, but I really like the look of the app (I’m using a dark theme, as you can see in the screenshots below).

Mixel is a free, with in-app purchases (for more recipes than the basic 80 included in the free version). After using it for just a day or so I decided to go all-in with the Premium pack.