Bartesian’s cocktail makers would be best described like a Keurig or Nespresso machine, but for alcoholic drinks. The Bartesian Duet model that I tested certainly lives up to that description — it’s really easy to serve a bunch of different cocktails with the push of a button, plus your own liquor.
But as I sipped on my raspberry ginger gimlet, I couldn’t shake the nagging question: who is actually going to buy a $300 cocktail robot?
There’s nothing wrong with the product. And it does exactly what it says! In the sleekly designed machine, you add your spirits of choice (between one and four types of liquor, depending on what model you’re using) and plop in a Bartesian capsule with hyper-concentrated mixes for multi-ingredient drinks like espresso martinis, watermelon margaritas, mai tais, and cosmos. There’s a barcode on the capsule that your machine scans to determine what spirit (or spirits) you need in your drink, and then you can select how strong you want your drink to be, which modulates the amount of water the machine will use to dilute the concentrate. Then, you put the drink in the provided, high-quality cocktail shaker with some ice to cool it down before pouring it into your glass.
