Rejoice, O ye Boozehounds: Beachbum Berry's Tiki+ App is Back

I’m happy with my iPhone again and it’s all Jeff Berry’s fault.

Earlier this year, I upgraded the old phone’s OS. And regretted doing so every single time I used turned the thing on. When once it was blazing fast, it had become maddeningly slow. There were other problems, but the most annoying of those was that my backup failed during the upgrade and all my apps just…vanished. They were not on my laptop, not on my phone, not anywhere.

I’m a Mac guy. That day, though, I learned to distrust Apple.

I’m digging it again. Tonight, the iTunes store is once more offering Beachbum Berry’s Tiki+ app. Tiki+ is a fantastic application. It’s a searchable database of tropical drinks recipe drawn from years of Jeff Berry’s field work sussing out the secret mixtures of old tiki bartenders. It’s the single best source of information about tropical drinks that will fit in your pocket. The next best option would be Berry’s books themselves.

When the old app disappeared, I went to download it again, only to find that it was no longer available. Berry told me that they were retooling the app and it had been delisted from Apple's online store. Well, now it’s out in a revised format. It’s $3.99 on iTunes and if you are at all interested in the rum-heavy drinks of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations — plus a few dozen new concoctions from the Bum himself — it’s the wisest $4 you’ll spend all year.

The deets:

• Over 150 drink recipes
• Mark your favorites for easy-finding
• Photos and old menu illustrations
• Add your own notes to the recipes
• Thumbnail histories of the drinks
• Like a recipe? Hell, yeah, you do: email it with a tap

Here’s Martin Doudoroff on the differences between the old and new applications and why the change.