MixStik Is An Essential Mixology Tool To Make Great Cocktails With No Skill

There’s nothing like a sweet, sweet cocktail during summertime. But if your bar skills aren’t up to snuff your options are fairly limited. Until now. Meet MixStik, a small connected stick that will help you make tasty cocktails from your very first try.

Here’s how it works: First, you need to turn on the MixStik and connect it with your smartphone using Bluetooth. After that, you’re good to go for the night. You can browse and select a cocktail on your phone, it will then turn on the LEDs on the MixStik. Once the stick is in your shaker or glass, you just need to follow the instructions on your phone and on the stick.

For instance, the app will tell you that you need to pour lemon juice, vodka, cointreau and cranberry juice to make a cosmpolitan. The bottom two LEDs will be in green, showing you that you need to pour lemon juice to cover these two LEDs in your shaker. Then, the white LEDs indicate how much vodka you need to put in your shaker, etc.

MixStik features a full-size USB port to recharge the battery. You can plug it in to your computer’s USB port like a big USB key or you can use your phone charger.

There are a couple of nifty features as well. It’s very easy to set the right parameters for your shaker. In the settings screen, you can put the stick in “ruler” mode and measure the top and bottom diameters with the LEDs. For each cocktail, you can select whether you want to make one glass or two glasses. Finally, you can select the bottles that you have at home to see what kind of cocktail you can make.

But the best part is that it will only cost $39. Given the price of a bottle of alcohol, it doesn’t feel very expensive if you’re going to use it regularly. I’ve tried it multiple times already and it’s very fun to use. Anybody can make a cocktail. And if you’re an experienced barman, you can learn new recipes.

Now you might remember another connected device for mixology I covered last year — the B4RM4N smart shaker. Unfortunately, the Kickstarter campaign for B4RM4N failed because the device was too expensive ($100 to $150 for a shaker). MixStik is the second version of B4RM4N with the same team behind it. It’s a streamlined, simplified, less bulky and more affordable device that will definitely be more successful.

MixStik is the perfect example of a great startup pivot, and I can’t wait to see how much money the team is going to raise. The Kickstarter campaign will start on September 29th, and, as you can see in the video, I had the chance to spend an evening making and drinking cocktails with the two founders. Hit play and sign up on the company’s website if you want to receive an email when the Kickstarter campaign goes live.

Video shot by Thibaut Oskian & Hugo Oskian, edited by Steve Long

MixStik