Bartesian Cocktail Maker

Verdict

Like a Nespresso for cocktails, the Bartesian Cocktail Maker uses high-quality pods and mixes them automatically with your choice of alcohol (or water for a mocktail). Pouring quality cocktails fast, the Bartesian Cocktail Maker delivers bar-quality drinks in seconds, making it great fun for cocktail lovers. Its high price, the cost of capsules and the relatively limited range may put some people off.

Introduction

Like a Nespresso for cocktails, the Bartesian Cocktail Maker uses high-quality pods and mixes them automatically with your choice of alcohol (or water for a mocktail).

Pouring quality cocktails fast, the Bartesian Cocktail Maker delivers bar-quality drinks in seconds, making it great fun for cocktail lovers. Its high price, the cost of capsules and the relatively limited range may put some people off.

Design and features

• Takes four bottles of alcohol
• Uses cocktail pods
• You still have to provide garnish

There’s nothing like a fine cocktail on a lazy evening, but the effort to make one often means that I skip one in favour of something easier to make. The Bartesian Cocktail Maker is designed to make life easier, taking cocktail pods and making cocktails at the touch of a button.

Rather than the pods containing alcohol, the machine comes with five 950ml glass bottles, which you fill with your own choice of gin, rum, vodka, tequila and whiskey (or bourbon). There are marked slots for each type of drink, with gin and rum sharing one slot, and you swap bottles as required based on your chosen drink.

The advantage of this system is that you get to choose your own base alcohol and aren’t forced into cheaper drinks.

Having space for four large bottles does mean that the Bartesian Cocktail Maker is rather large and takes up a considerable amount of counter space, to the point that you really need to use this often if you’re going to have it sat out all of the time.

All of the magic comes from the cocktail pods, which clip into the top of the machine and are mixed in automatically with the right levels of alcohol (or water if you want to have a mocktail). In this regard, the Bartesian Cocktail Maker is a bit like a Nespresso machine, only for cocktails.

Currently, there are nine different cocktail capsules available: lemon drop, margarita, Long Island iced tea, old fashioned, whiskey sour, cosmopolitan, uptown rocks, espresso martini and pomegranate margarita. A box of six taster capsules is provided as a starter.

Each capsule is filled with fresh, natural ingredients, mixed by professional mixologists to replicate the taste and flavour you’d get in a high-end cocktail bar.

You also get hit with the high-end price. Each set of eight capsules costs £19.99, so you’re paying £2.50 per drink without the cost of the alcohol. Depending on your choice and how much you use, that could be another few pounds per drink. Convenient it may be, but the Bartesian Cocktail Maker certainly isn’t particularly cheap per drink. Unfortunately, there’s no cocktail subscription offer in the UK; a scheme that is offered in the US.

Making a drink is as simple as dropping the capsule into the holder and then shutting the lid. The Bartesian Cocktail Maker reads the capsule’s barcode and tells you what type of glass to make.

It then gives you a choice of how to make the drink: mocktail (no alcohol), or light, regular and strong (varying the amount of alcohol used).

You do have to add any garnish that you want at the end, such as some orange peel and a cherry for an old fashioned.

For each cocktail, the Bartesian Cocktail Maker knows the right ratio of the alcoholic ingredients, mixing them automatically and pouring them. When done, you can pop the capsule out, take the foil off and rinse out the plastic for recycling.

Performance

• Fast and convenient
• Excellent taste

Compared to doing the job manually, the Bartesian Cocktail Maker is fast. I love an old fashioned, but they are a relatively slow drink to make. Using Hell’s Stone Whisky (typically, an old fashioned would be bourbon, but I think this Cornish whisky is better), I had a glass ready in under 30 seconds.

The taste was very good. In fact, the Bartesian Cocktail Maker produced an old fashioned as good as I could make, with practically no mess.

Next, I went for an uptown rocks, which is gin-based, using peach, white grape and lemon juices, with a hit of coriander. I thought there was a danger that this drink would taste a little artificial, but the opposite was true: the mixed drink was delicious and every bit as good as a drink served in a bar.

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