Jigger: Cocktail Drink Recipes

Review by eFreeware

If you keep a few bottles at home and enjoy mixing drinks for guests, Jigger is built with you in mind. It gathers cocktail recipes into one place, lets you record what is actually on your shelf, and works out what you can pour tonight without a trip to the store.

The app comes from developer Oleh Zasadnyy and sits in the Food & Drink category. It is free to download, carries no ads, and offers in-app purchases. The library covers both classic drinks and more recent creations, and you can add or edit recipes of your own, so the collection reflects your taste rather than a fixed catalog.

What appeals to me most is the pairing of recipes with inventory. Instead of scrolling past drinks you cannot make, you tell the app what you have and it shows the matches. That is a small idea, but it is the difference between a recipe list and something you actually use while standing at the counter.

A fit for home bartenders and hosts

The strongest case for Jigger is the home bartender who owns more than a bottle of gin and a lime. If you like trying new drinks but dislike buying an ingredient for a single recipe, the My Bar feature speaks directly to that problem: you list what you have, and the app shows what those bottles and mixers can produce.

It also suits anyone who hosts. The Party Planner is designed for exactly that situation: choose the cocktails for the evening, set how many servings you need, and the app calculates the bottles, juices and garnishes to buy. That is the kind of arithmetic most people get wrong when planning for a crowd.

People who treat cocktails as a hobby rather than a necessity will get more from the filtering tools. Being able to narrow by strength, taste profile, preparation method, ice type or difficulty means you can match a drink to the evening rather than picking at random. For someone just starting out, the difficulty filter is a reasonable way to avoid techniques you are not ready for.

The app also handles more than one setup, which is useful if you keep a home bar and a place at a vacation rental or a second home. Each bar holds its own ingredient list.

The recipe library and your own additions

Browsing is the core of the app. The library is described as ever-growing, mixing well-known classics with modern creative drinks, and it is organized so you can find something for a given occasion. The developer's framing is that there is a pour for any event, which is marketing language, but the underlying idea of a broad, curated selection is straightforward enough.

The newer capability is the ability to write your own recipes. You can build a drink from scratch or take an existing one and adjust it to suit your palate, and your creations sit alongside the built-in ones rather than in a separate area. For anyone who has spent years tweaking a house negroni or a family punch, that is the feature that turns the app from a reference into a personal notebook.

Favorites and custom lists handle organization. You can save the drinks you return to and group them into themed collections, so a set of holiday punches or brunch spritzes can be kept apart from your everyday options. It is a simple mechanism, but it saves a lot of scrolling when you already know the kind of drink you want.

Filtering, bars and planning a party

The filtering system is where the app earns its keep. You can narrow the library by the ingredients you have, by strength, by taste profile, by preparation method, by ice type or by difficulty. Stacking a few of those filters is a quick way to move from a vague mood to a shortlist of drinks that fit it.

My Bar works alongside those filters. You record the bottles, juices and other items you keep on hand, and the app shows what is possible with them. Because you can maintain several bars, you can keep a main setup and a secondary one.

The Party Planner is the most ambitious part. You select the cocktails for an event, set serving sizes, and it works out the total quantity of bottles, juices and garnishes required. For anyone who has guessed at how much lime juice a party needs and been wrong, that calculation is the reason to use the app rather than a search engine.

All of this is meant to stay in step across devices. The developer says your cocktails, bars and party plans sync. That matters most for the party planning side, where the list is something you carry with you.

What you pay and what that buys

Jigger is free to download. It shows no ads. The app does offer in-app purchases, so the free download is not the whole picture.

The combination is straightforward: no cost to install, no advertising, and optional spending available.

That combination is unusual enough to be worth noting. A free app with no ads and paid extras is an unusual combination.

How it compares with the alternatives

Most people solve the cocktail recipe problem with a search engine and a handful of bookmarked pages. That works fine for looking up a single drink, but it does nothing for the questions Jigger is built around: what can I make with what I have, and how much do I need to buy for twelve people. Those two jobs are where a dedicated app pulls ahead of scattered web pages.

Printed cocktail books are the other common route. They are pleasant to browse, but they cannot do what an app can. If your interest is reading about drinks rather than making them on a given evening, a book still does that job well.

A general recipe app is a third option. Jigger is narrower by design, which is the point: it is a mixology toolkit rather than a general cooking companion. If your cooking and your drinking live in the same app, you will notice the difference in focus.

A free toolkit for people who mix at home

Jigger has been on the Play Store since March 2020 and has picked up more than 10,000 installs, with a 4.3 average across 140 ratings.

For a free app with no advertising, the package is generous: a curated library, your own recipes, ingredient tracking across multiple bars, filtering on several dimensions, party planning with quantities, and syncing between devices. The in-app purchases are worth checking before you commit to using it as your main recipe store.

I would point this at home bartenders who want to make better use of the bottles they already own, and at hosts who would rather have a calculated shopping list than a guess. If your interest in cocktails is occasional and you mostly look up one drink at a time, the app's strengths sit in territory you may not visit often. For anyone mixing regularly, the combination of inventory, filters and party math is the reason to install it.

What's new in version 2.11.0

Performance and stability improvements