A couple of days ago, my buddy Chris Herbert & Don Southard released a lovely iPhone app called BeerTab that helps you maintain a catalogue of your favorite beers right on your iPhone. Don also makes the lovely Watermarker app for Mac and this is his first collaboration with Chris. BeerTab offers a beautifully simple interface coupled with fluid animations & transitions that make it a joy to use.
BeerTab is designed to let you add your favorite beers to the app so that you can reference them later or share them with your friends or followers. You begin by adding the name of the beer, its brewery, style, ABV & IBU values and Notes (including shortcuts for the date, time & location). You can also take a photo with your camera or add one from your Photos.app. If this seems like too much work, there’s an in-built barcode scanner that you can use to auto-fill these details. The app pulls these details from an extensive database, so most of the popular beers should already be available for you. Next, you add ratings to the beer based off its Appearance, Taste & Aroma. Based on these 3 ratings that you provide, BeerTab calculates the Overall rating for that beer. The data you’ve entered in the app can be shared on social networks or the app generates a unique URL with a page containing all the data for that beer. There are five themes in the app to choose from — Chocolate Stout, Oktoberfest, Paddy’s Day, Boston Brew & Campside. However, you also can build your own custom theme if you want. There’s a bunch of configurable options in the app’s Settings, including the option to Export/Import your data.
BeerTab 1.0 is off to a great start with the right mixture of features, quality & elegance. There’s a minor bug with the auto-complete selection & scrolling in the app, but I’m sure it’ll be ironed out in an update. BeerTab is available on the App Store for $1.99.