"Cocktails are now so numerous," the journalist H.L. Mencken wrote 60 years ago, "that no bartender, however talented, can remember how to make all of them, or even half of them." Mencken added, "No man short of a giant could try them all, and nine-tenths of them, I believe, would hardly be worth trying." This from a man who once hired a mathematician to calculate how many drinks could be mixed from a well-stocked bar. The answer: 17,864,392,788. "We tried 273 at random," Mencken reported, "and found all of them good."

If anyone had taken Mencken at his word, of course, there wouldn't be shelves of fat bartending guides and certainly no need for the cocktail database applications now available at the App Store. Two of the four applications available in English are highly useful in their own way. (A fifth app, Cocktails by Swiss-Development, is available only in German so is not reviewed here.) The best of the lot allow users to create and manage a list of favorite drinks, e-mail or text message recipes to friends, and feature about 5,500 recipes between them. But all suffer from flaws that the developers would do well to remedy in future releases.

Cocktails, by Skorpiostech is a mobile version of CocktailDB. Beautifully rendered and impeccably sourced, every recipe includes a reference to where the drink first appeared--usually 1930 or before, but many of more recent vintage. The app is so history-oriented, in fact, that it includes 128 recipes that are impossible to make today because the ingredients no longer exist. Cocktails also lets users browse and search by base ingredient (gin, dark rum, light rum, vodka, and so on) and type of drink (cocktail, flip, fizz, pousse café, and more).

Cocktail Tales: The recipes contained in Cocktails are impeccably sourced with references to when the drink first appeared.

One notable omission from the Web version is the Mixilator, a random cocktail generator that produces classic recipes based on the user's tastes. Here's hoping the Mixilator finds its way into the mobile version soon.

There are three problems with the Cocktails app. First, the application isn't very stable. It crashed on me at least half-a-dozen times during testing. Second, the app doesn't let users make notes or modifications to the recipes. Third, the database's emphasis on classic and defunct drinks comes at the expense of more contemporary cocktail offerings. A database the includes a recipe for the anachronistic Alabama Fizz but not the Alabama Slammer might have cocktail geek cred, but won't be of much help to a beleaguered bartender struggling to remember whether or not the recipe calls for sloe gin. (It does.)

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