I want to take a quick look at a couple of useful apps for the iPhone (and maybe other platforms, I’ll let you figure that out) that are coffee-related: Brewseful and Press Coffee. I don’t have any affiliation with either company. Brewseful was a free app I downloaded last year and I’m assuming is still free. Press Coffee is a new acquisition that I paid a few dollars for if I remember correctly (sorry, I don’t have my phone sitting here while I write this and the app store for my Air won’t even pull it up, sigh). Doing a little research for this article I learned that my pals in Colorado, Corvus Coffee, supplied the included brew timers in the Press app, which is cool!
The Brewseful app is pretty much a one-trick pony brew timer, but the interface looks cool and it works very well, so that’s a good app, in my book! It’s a little frustrating to use at first, but once you figure out how to get to the recipe customization area it works well. You can save as many recipes as you want, name them, set alerts for the various parts of the brewing when you need to do something like pour more water, stir, whatever. It’s a nicely made, tasteful looking app and it does its job well. What more can you ask for?
Press has more features, including a custom recipe timer section. Setting up the recipes is a little clunky with Press, but again, once you get used to it it’s not bad. What I like better about Press is the coffee logging and mapping feature, though. I’m suspicious with how accurate the mapping is although the map does at least put the coffees in the correct countries! LOL In all fairness, many of these coffee plantations are near tiny towns that probably don’t even appear on local maps, so you have to take that into consideration. It’s cool to look at a map and see where you’re drinking your coffee from, though, and if you like maps you’ll like this app as long as you aren’t too OCD about the dot going onto the exact correct location in the country where the coffee was grown.
Press also lets you record all the details of the coffee, including name, roaster, farm, producer, varietal, processing method, elevation, region and country, roaster, date roasted, method used to prepare it, date of consumption, stars rating and notes. I keep my notes in Field Notes pocket notebooks, but it’s still all the info I need to hold onto for each coffee I drink otherwise, so it’s a nice app.
One thing to keep in mind with Press is that when you add a new coffee in the map part of the app, you need to leave the map module and then return to it before the newly entered coffee will show up.
