The Bartesian Premium Cocktail Maker Produces Drinks With the Push of a Button

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By Nick Guy

Ever since the Bartesian hit the market three years ago, I’ve been skeptical of this Keurig-like automatic cocktail machine. I’m a former bartender and current home-cocktail enthusiast, and lots of people have asked me about this buzzy appliance. If you have the option, you’re always better off making cocktails with fresh juices, quality mixers and quality barware instead of a syrup-filled pod. But we decided to check out the Bartesian and another cocktail machine, the Bev by Black & Decker. After slinging a few dozen drinks at an office happy hour, I can see the appeal for certain types of situations.

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If you don't want to have to play bartender when you’re entertaining or prefer made-to-order drinks over canned cocktails, an automatic cocktail maker might be for you. Of the two on the market, the Bev is a better investment. Here's why—plus, everything you’ll want to know if you’re considering buying one.

If you’re familiar with Keurig's pod-based coffee makers, you already have a good idea of how the Bev functions. Instead of purchasing coffee pods, you buy pre-measured capsules of cocktails that generally come in 8-packs for $20, or $2.50 a drink. They’re made by Bartesian, the company also responsible for the competing machine. (Scroll down for details.)

The Bev takes up a lot of countertop or bar space, with a 13.25-inch by 12-inch footprint and a height of about 15.5 inches, which means it may not be a great choice for a small home. It holds five 750-milliliter bottles ("fifths") of liquor, with labeled spots for gin, rum, tequila, vodka and whiskey. That's a somewhat simplistic view of spirits. "Whiskey" is not just one thing: If you’re making a penicillin cocktail, you’ll need Scotch whisky, or for an old fashioned you’ll want bourbon, for example, but the Bev's system is pretty flexible for swapping bottles in and out. There's a sixth spot for water, with a glass bottle included. Dilution is important to a cocktail's flavor, and since you’re not getting melted ice from stirring or shaking, adding water is essential. All six liquids are fed into the machine through metal straws inserted into the bottles.

A bar code reader inside the capsule holder scans the pod to determine which liquor (or liquors) the Bev will dispense. You can turn the silver knob to adjust the cocktail strength from a no-alcohol mocktail to a heavy pour, which generally means 2.5 ounces of spirit. (The capsules’ packaging lists the amounts for each strength.) Once everything is dialed in, all you have to do is push the "mix" button and the Bev starts pouring the spirit and water through the pod, combining it with the syrup for a composed cocktail. LED lights beneath the bottles light up as they’re being used, which is a nice touch. The whole process takes less than 30 seconds per drink.

Bartesian sells more than 50 cocktail capsule varieties. Our taste-testers generally liked them, though there were a few duds. In an unscientific survey (we were drinking cocktails, after all) the happy hour attendees’ average quality rating on a 1 to 5 scale was 3.4, with a 3.8 average for whether they’d drink the same cocktail again. The overwhelming sentiment seemed to be "Wow, this actually isn't bad." Not great, not amazing, but for the most part, plenty drinkable.

The shelf-stable capsules don't contain any liquor. Their ingredient lists reveal they’re mostly water, sugar and juice concentrate, which is another way of saying flavored syrup. That's not necessarily a bad thing—those ingredients are the base elements of many cocktails—but many of our testers felt the drinks were missing a fresh element and were generally quite sweet. The flavored margarita varieties ranked highly among our testers, for example, and while they taste better than what you’d get from a plastic bottle of mix off the shelf, they don't compare to one made with freshly squeezed lime juice and high-quality triple sec (Cointreau, if you’re faithful to the classic recipe). Personally, I was surprised by how much I liked the rum-based jungle bird, and the old fashioned was better than expected as well.

The negroni and the gin martini, however, were total failures. A negroni is made entirely of spirits: gin, bitter Campari and sweet vermouth. Bartesian tries to replicate the latter two elements in the nonalcoholic capsule, and the result is an overwhelming woody, herbaceous flavor that one tester likened to "rosemary bug spray." I wouldn't have been able to identify it as a negroni in a masked test. The martini tasted like it was made with artificial olive juice; many of our testers declined to finish theirs.

The Bartesian Premium Cocktail Machine made its debut in 2019. If you’re aware of any cocktail maker, it's probably this one. Even though it's conceptually similar to the later-to-market Bev, and Bartesian makes the drink pods that both machines use, it has some major downsides that make it a definitively inferior choice.

Bartesian's machine requires you to decant your liquor into five (included) glass bottles. After you screw the lid on you flip them over and insert them into labeled holders. There are two deal-breaking issues here.

The first is that when you insert the bottles, some of the spirit gets sucked up into the works, and potentially left in the line until you make your next cocktail with that liquor. The second is that there are only four spots for the five bottles. You’re supposed to swap between the gin and rum bottles as necessary for the drink you’re making. This means that if your gin martini follows a mai tai, for example, it’ll be tainted by the leftover rum. That cross-contamination is unacceptable. (For a detailed teardown that shows just how much the spirits mix in the Bartesian, watch this video from the YouTube channel How To Drink.) Yes, you can rinse the line in between cocktails, but if you do that, you’re flushing out valuable liquor. Even if the Bartesian were an otherwise perfect machine, this issue would prevent us from being able to recommend it.

We have a handful of smaller complaints. The touch screen is low resolution and not as responsive as it should be for the price. The body doesn't feel as well-made as the Bev's—though both are made of plastic, the Bartesian's has more flex to it than we’d prefer and its seams don't all line up neatly. On top of that, the Bartesian is more expensive than the Bev by nearly 25% at the time of publication.

If you have the space, you like to host without having to be the bartender the whole time and your guests aren't overly picky about the caliber of your drinks, the Bev a useful device. Several of our testers noted they’d be happy to see one of these at a party: "Good for entertaining company, not for household use," noted one. Another called it "an easy conversation starter." The advantage of the Bev over canned cocktails is that you can choose your own spirits and adjust the alcohol volume. Plus, it's futuristic fun to let a robot make your drink.