Now that your liver has sufficiently recovered from the holidays, it may be time to take stock of how much beer you really drink. Using BeerStat, you can keep track of how much goes down the hatch, out of your wallet and straight to your gut.
If you want to know more follow the jump.
The Basics
BeerStat offers a great way to track what you are drinking, how much you are drinking and how much you are spending to drink it. With a slick user interface, BeerStat allows you to add your favorite beer brands into a simple list that allows you to easily judge just how much you drink (which may or may not be a good thing).
After entering in basic stats such as average monthly salary, body weight and drinking goals (or limits), BeerStat will provide statistics to help you take off those beer goggles for a realistic view on your personal intake.
Getting Started
When you first launch the app a tutorial will open, breaking down the basics of the app. After that, simply start plugging (and chugging) away.
BeerStat gives you a real look at just how much beer you consume.
The home page of the app features a counter of total beer consumed with an extremely visible Add button (they want to make sure you won’t miss it when you are in the cups) and a sliding menu bar.
BeerStat allows you to add a brand to your list of beer brands.
To add a drink (or two), press Add and the Had a beer? page will open. This page has a rotating beer picker allowing you to choose the number of beers, the brand, amount of liquid and whether it came from a pub, bottle, can or was free. You also need to set a price (it will self-populate if you have already included the information when you added the brand) and set the date. You can add beers for dates in the past, which is helpful if you have a friend conveniently remind you of the extra (half-dozen) beers you had the night before.
To add beers to the picker, tap the Add Brand tab in the top right corner. The app doesn’t come with any pre-loaded beers, so it can get rather tedious adding the different flavors that you drink on a day-to-day basis. However, once you have added the main ones, you can favorite them so that you can toggle your picker between a list of your favorite beers and all the beers that you have added. When you add a brand of beer, you must include the name and volume, which really means alcohol content. You can also star the brand if it is one of your favorites and add the average price per can, bottle and in a pub.
Set limits to measure your beer drinking habits against. (So that's where my paycheck went…)
Once you add a beer, an overlay will appear allowing you to add another brew or view your statistics.
To set basic measurements to base your stats on, slide the menu bar at the bottom to Settings. The options are to set beer and budget limits (or goals) per week. You can also set your age, weight and monthly income to better keep track of how beer impacts both your salary and your weight.
Beer Stats pulls up a list of your metrics, ranging from total beer consumed to how much exercise it would take to work off said beer.
The Stats page can be viewed by Day, Week, Month and Overall. The stats show how many beers you have had in relation to your limit, and how much money you have spent out of your allotted beer budget. It also has handy little facts such as your favorite beer of the day, week, month; your beer drinking record; the amount of beer you consumed versus your weight; the percentage of your salary spent on beer; the amount of pure alcohol you consumed; and how long you have to run or have sex to burn off the calories — which was a real eye-opener.
Records give you a look into your personal beer achievements, while the Calendar gives you a visual on what days those achievements took place.
Another feature that Beerstat provides is an insight into all of the records that you have created, such as how many beers in one day, and longest time spent without a beer. The menu also has a Beer labels tab that will show you all of your beer brands in alphabetical order, whether or not they are a favorite brand and how many beers of that brand you have consumed.
Just in case you get bored waiting for the next round, BeerStat provides random drinking related facts.
BeerStat also provides a calendar that shows which days you have had beer, and which days are record-breaking.
To round out the app, BeerStat has a Facts tab—this comes in handy when waiting for the next round.
Conclusion
Overall, I think that BeerStat is a very relevant app to beer connoisseurs, however there is definitely some room for improvement. The two major things that make usability somewhat sticky is the fact that you need to add each brand of beer into the app; I wish that there were pre-loaded common beers. Also, you can only add the brand, which makes it hard to add multiple types of beer that are produced by the same company. The volume should be relabeled as alcohol percentage, and finally, the different options for the amount of liquid in each beer are confusing, and I often just go with a general pint rather than trying to figure out the exact amount.
Other than that, the app definitely is useful in shedding light on your total amount of beer consumption and spending. If only the app covered wine and cocktails, too — then I would really understand where all of my money goes.