Is the Bartesian Cocktail Machine Worth It? I Tried It to See

The machine on my kitchen table is a holy device, if your definition of “holy” is that it looks like a glowing halo and it’s filled with spirits. The machine has taken up a task I consider sacred: making me a cocktail. In advance of holiday party season, I have been testing a pair of devices that promise an indulgent future, a life where machines can make you a passable Old Fashioned.

The best-known cocktail machine on the market is almost certainly the Bartesian, the easy-peasy Keurig of cocktail makers. The circular device on my table is the Barsys 360, a Day-Glo device with a bit more flair for the dramatic.

Right now the Barsys is making me an Oaxaca Old Fashioned, but it could have been any of literally 2,000 other drinks, if I only had the ingredients. Among “Oaxaca” drinks alone we potentially also have a “Flower,” a “Gold,” and a “Tail.” The Barsys promises nearly 50 takes on Old Fashioned, and more than 70 versions of the mule. (A third cocktail machine option, the Bev by Black + Decker, uses Bartesian’s capsules with a different device design. It is likely being discontinued according to reps, but is still available on Amazon.)

It’s all very ridiculous, my friends assure me, when I send them videos of the Barsys aggressively spitting ingredients into a glass whose magnetic bottom spins the liquid inside into an icy, frothy whirlpool.

“I am embarrassed to be watching this,” wrote my editor at WIRED.

“That is so dumb,” echoed a friend, before adding, “You should definitely bring it over.”

No one really needs a machine to make a decent cocktail, of course. But you might want one anyway. I have a theory, the kind of big idea you hear sometimes in small bars. The promise of an automatic cocktail machine is not ease, nor necessity, nor even usefulness. It is, instead, excitement. It is fun. It is whatever will make today different from yesterday. It’s that little bit of dumb gee-whiz that makes your neighbor happy to come over, gives people something to talk about at a holiday party, or keeps your partner mildly entertained after a Tuesday that just kind of sucked the life out of her.

As holiday party season arrives, here’s how to choose between two flawed but kinda fun cocktail machines. Machines that mirror the life they indulge.

Best for Parties: The Barsys 360

The Barsys 360 is a flashy machine, literally. Select your drink on the device’s phone app, and the machine will light up like a discotheque or a try-hard bowling alley. The Barsys pours in hard, aggressive squirts—impressively accurate to within three-hundredths of an ounce, by my measure.

As it pours your drink, the device’s lights will change from white to blue to green when your cocktail is ready. And if you’ve also bought Barsys’ mixer glass ($45) with a magnetic spinner, the cup will now very rapidly swirl your drink, ice and all, as it spins your tropical diamond daiquiri into a green-lit froth. Whoopee! Glowing, spinning drink!

We are firmly in party-trick territory here. And lord, it’s stupid. And fun. And stupid. If you keep it on your kitchen counter, the device may cause you to make too many drinks just because you can, and because you’ve filled the reservoirs anyway. This can be dangerous on a work night.

But you do not, of course, really need a big circular device to measure cocktails for you. Measuring cocktails is pretty easy. Aside from speed–and the Barsys is impressively fast—the real sell on the Barsys is that its app contains 2,000 drink recipes and counting, and can operate as a sort of cocktail concierge to make drinks out of whatever you happen to have on hand.

By itself, the Barsys 260 is a somewhat fancified dispenser and scale, with six 750-milliliter channels for liquors or mixers housed within the machine’s outer ring. But the real action is in the Bluetooth-enabled phone app, which is needed to operate the device.

When you punch in the ingredients you’ve got on offer at home, the Barsys app will call up a menu of possible drinks. Choose a classic array of mixers (gin, whiskey, sweet and dry vermouth, Campari, vodka) and you may have as many as 30 cocktails to choose from. Choose more idiosyncratically (pineapple, lime, tequila, mezcal, agave syrup) and your library may shrink to five.

Once you load up those channels, you’ve got a fun little menu of drinks you may have never even heard of. Each can be customized to taste, or you can mess around utterly from scratch. It’s like a cocktail video game with real-world results.

Video: Matthew Korfhage

But this said, the Barsys can be sloshy. It’s not easy to swap spirits or mixers once you change your mind. You need to flush and then clean each channel, by using a cleaning solution of either soap and water or water and vinegar, and the machine gets quite insistent that you do so if you’ve left a perishable ingredient like lime juice in the chamber for a day. The app can be finicky–it loves to disconnect from your device—and it’s not overly good at tracking the amount of booze you’ve got in each chamber.

And of course, the Barysys is measuring its cocktails by weight, even though most cocktail recipes known to man measure by volume. An ounce of water is an ounce of water, by weight or by volume. But most sugary mixers are heavier than water, while straight liquors are lighter. And so you may need to futz with recipes a bit before they come out right.

Which is to say, the Barysys is in some ways ingenious, but in most regards a work in progress. The machine can be fun for a tipsy night at home, if you and your partner love trying out drinks from a new set of ingredients.

But the machine’s best home use is likely as a conversation starter at a house party, pre-filled with six mixers and a set menu of drinks. Place the phone app in “party mode,” and guests will be able to download the app and connect independently to your device via Bluetooth to make cocktails. Glowing, spinning cocktails for everybody!

Best for Easy Cocktails: Bartesian Premium and Bartesian Professional

The best-known automatic cocktail machine on the market is a lot less flashy than the Barsys 360, and perhaps also less versatile. But for this, the Bartesian Professional Cocktail Machine is easy. It’s about as hard to use as a Keurig pod coffee machine, and it works about the same way.

Just fill the device’s proprietary bottles with the appropriate liquor, and install them upside down into the base of the machine at the slot for each liquor. Then plunk in the appropriate cocktail pod. Perhaps your druthers is an espresso martini, a Long Island iced tea, or a blackberry margarita? The Bartesian does not discriminate. It can replicate seemingly every bad decision ever made on a cruise ship.

Video: Matthew Korfhage

Amid the whirring of a vibratory pump, the device will then mix the pod’s contents with both liquor and water from a reservoir at the rear of the machine, then drop the results into your waiting glass. The Bartesian suggests appropriate glassware, and whether to put ice in the glass, but you don’t have to listen.

The device also allows you to choose whether you prefer a heavy pour or a light touch with liquor dosing. Like any bartender who’s eager to please, the Bartesian pours strong by default.

Anyway, the drinks are fine in a Spring Break way, best when you choose silly ones like a lemon drop, a flavored margarita, or a Long Island iced tea. An Old Fashioned will be pretty similar to a version swizzled on the fly with lemon, but a vermouthless Manhattan made with natural flavors and juice concentrates will not be a shortcut to sophistication.

As a party device, the Bartesian can also be a bit of an indulgence since the capsules cost about $3 apiece. But it’s great as a courtesy (and novelty) to a visiting houseguest, and especially as a home convenience for those who’d rather not keep a full home bar. One of the more cumbersome things about keeping a bar at home is the constant replenishment of perishable mixers, and the space they all take up. Bartesian’s capsules are compact, just 1.5 ounces apiece, and keep about six months.

The Bartesian device comes in a few varieties. There’s also a “Duet” with just two bottle options, and a “Premium” with four bottles. The “Professional” is a lot like the Premium but with better bottle design and the option to lock the device so little meddling hands can’t pull out the booze bottles. The locking feature was designed for bars, to comply with regulations, but every parent I know immediately cottoned to the idea of bottles that could not be removed without a key.

This’ll work great for fending off curious young kids, but note that the machine only locks in the liquor bottles, not the actual device. It didn’t take me long to figure out how to jailbreak the device by putting in an empty capsule. The machine still reads the barcode, and then dispenses a shot of booze mixed with water from the reservoir. An enterprising teen could likely figure this out, if they really wanted to.

Somewhat hackable security aside, I still far prefer the Pro for its leakproof bottle design. On sale for Black Friday at close to the same price as the Premium, it’s probably the version I’d go for. Still, the Premium is available at a significant premium.

Is an Automatic Cocktail Machine Worth it?

Both prominent cocktail machines on the market hover around the $300 mark when on sale, not counting a full-service robot-arm cocktail kiosk selling on Alibaba.com for more like $32,000. And each is a mid-sized, single-use machine, designed to do nothing but make you drinks, at the expense of a certain amount of counter space.

This is not a negligible expense for most people, so it really depends on what kind of fun you expect to have, and how often you expect to have it. If you find cocktails daunting, or don’t want to invite the trouble of maintaining an extensive home bar, the simplicity of the Bartesian may make it a good option. If you want a new toy to play with, and the chance to try out a whole bunch of cocktails without cracking a book, the Barsys may be your huckleberry.

This said, if you’re the sort of person who’s already thinking about a cocktail machine, you could also just think about whether your passion might not be equally ignited by a good bar set. This comes down to a classic Boston shaker set ($30), a strainer ($13) to match, a two-sided bar jigger ($19), and a section of your kitchen counter that sorta permanently has a dish towel folded onto it. The right tools for a job are also kinda exciting, in their way, and a bit less expensive.

But otherwise, to be honest, the most fun I’ve had making cocktails at home this year has been using the slushie machine from Ninja, which has now spawned a new generation of home slushie machines. You’d be surprised how quickly a room full of adults will line up for a slushie version of literally anything. The Ninja Slushi is about the same price as the cocktail machines surveyed here, but offers a chillingly different experience.

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