Craft Beer Week: Which top beer app is best?

Michigan's immense and growing array of craft beers can be tricky to navigate. It can even be tough to remember which brews you have and haven't tried. For such first-world challenges, we present some smartphone-friendly solutions.

We extensively tested six popular beer apps, giving them a 12-Michigan-beer check to make sure they're well-versed in local suds.

The results show some of the more innovative beer apps aren't especially fluent in Mitten State beer. But the ones with the most detail, based on a beer website and magazine, also were among the least user-friendly.

With more than 3,000 "beer" results coming up in the iTunes app search, these apps were selected for their shared goals of connecting people to craft beer using rating systems, reviews, social connections and location-specific information.

After testing these six (and test-driving about 15 inferior apps), we've found some fun and informative options to improve your beer-drinking experiences. And there's no better time to share the results than during American Craft Beer Week (May 11-17).

The best overall? Untappd. But Next Glass, an app that uses chemistry-based algorithms to make Netflix-like recommendations, has potential despite its present lack of local beers.

The comparisons were made using an iPhone on May 1, varying from newer, less-heard-of brews to favorites such as Bell's Oberon, using a rating system of one to four stars. The apps also are available on smartphones running Google's Android operating system. A number of these apps add beers every day, so it's possible some beers have been included since the research was completed.

Untappd

The inspiration for a staggering number of close-up photos of freshly poured pints, this app can elevate the casual dabbler into a craft beer hound.

The interface is pretty easy to learn and features a slick news feed showing all of you and your friends' recent check-ins along with beer ratings, photos and the name of the beer including the label, alcohol-by-volume and more. The photo-editing tools are pretty fun and put my Instagram beer shots to shame.

This is the only beer app I've found that connected me with a decent number of social-media friends, as most of the others aren't as popular. There also are badges offered for beer-drinking achievements such as having beers from multiple countries or of especially high hoppiness.

I ran into a guy at the Park Bar who drove more than an hour to downtown Detroit to earn the "Founders Nitro Stache" badge and have a glass of Founders Brewing's Nitro Pale Ale.

The profile feature shows how many distinct beers a user has had, ever, using the app. This is both good for bragging rights and bad for realizing just how much fermented malts you've consumed. Fortunately, calorie data is not tabulated.

Price: Free

Michigan beers: 12/12

User-friendliness:★★★ out of four stars

Usefulness:★★★★

Next Glass

A quick trip to the beer store can turn dizzying if you're looking to try something new that won't make you grimace at first sip. With Next Glass, you scan the label of a beer — or wine — with a smartphone and it offers up a score of how much you'll like the beverage.

The interface is clean, straightforward and easy to navigate. It builds your taste profile from one- to four-star ratings you've previously given. The app is described as offering tens of thousands of beer labels, but some catching up is needed to make this a very useful app for Michigan craft-beer drinkers.

Unlike Untappd, it displays each beer's calorie count and carbs. It also shows the entire beer in its bottle, as opposed to just the label's logo.

The app is still pretty new, released last November, so I wasn't able to connect with any friends on it. But once you do, and if it catches up in Michigan, it should be great for throwing parties. The app apparently makes it easy to shop for beer your friends will like, showing their anticipated ratings of a given beer or wine.

Next Glass claims to analyze the chemical makeup of all the beers it features, suggesting a very high success rate for matching you to something you'll love. And it's fun swiping through suggestions under its "Explore" tab to see recommended beers — so long as you can find them locally.

Price: Free

Michigan beers: 5/12

User-friendliness:★★★★

Usefulness:★★★

BeerAdvocate

This app is more for serious than casual craft-beer drinkers. It's virtually a mobile version of the www.beeradvocate.com website for the national print magazine. People use it to give detailed, sometimes lengthy reviews of beers using a sophisticated rating system down to two decimal places (such as 3.85/5) based on "look," "smell," "taste" and "feel."

Its interface is slow but informative, with a rundown of beer-themed events, releases and discussion forums both local and across the country. It isn't easy to navigate the mobile version. But if you find a beer that stands out as exceptionally good, it's enjoyable to look it up and see the range of flavors other people are getting out of it.

Price: Free

Michigan beers: 12/12

User-friendliness:★

Usefulness: ★★★

RateBeer

This app is loaded with beer info and is a great choice for craft-beer aficionados. Based on the www.ratebeer.com website, it's much more navigable than BeerAdvocate and also includes a bar-code scanner for logging beers. The automatic scanner isn't as easy to use as the manual label scanner on Next Glass, and it takes some maneuvering to get it to pick up the bar code. I had the best luck holding my phone 3-4 inches away.

The load times for getting around the app were longer than the rest, which can be annoying, but that's probably because of the breadth of information that pops up. Like several of the other apps, it has a location-based bar finder that includes ratings.

Given that all the other apps we tested were free, it seems a bit of a nuisance to have to pay for this one. But if you really care about beer, this app has pretty much all the depth you'd want and syncs nicely with the website.

Price: $3.99

Michigan beers: 12/12

User-friendliness:★★★

Usefulness:★★★

Elixr

This app, offering the gamut of everything served in a glass from behind a bar, appears minimalist and easily navigable. Perhaps in New York City, it's a good way to track down the best cocktails at the best spots.

But in metro Detroit, the content is too minimal. Even at Slows Bar BQ, one of the most popular spots here, there are only two check-ins.

The Michigan beer selection isn't impressive, and there isn't much detail behind the ones I could find. One neat thing is that you can name the bartender who served you. For cocktails, that would be great. But good luck finding any local bartenders.

Price: Free

Michigan beers: 5/12

User-friendliness:★★★

Usefulness:★

Pintley

If Untappd didn't exist, this would be an OK app to recommend. Its layout is similar, it has a respectable number of local beers and does have a social element. Unfortunately, none of my friends are on it. And if they were, we wouldn't be able to use the app to share photos of beers we've had, like in Untappd. The app's most recent update was June 2013, according to iTunes, and it looks it.

Price: Free

Michigan beers: 11/12

User-friendliness:★★★

Usefulness:★★

Here are the 12 beers selected from breweries across the state and used for the comparison: Atwater Brewing, Mai Bock; Griffin Claw Brewing, Mr. Blue Sky; Bell's Brewery, Oberon; Mountain Town Brewing, Train Wreck; Dark Horse Brewing, Fore Smoked Stout; Short's Brew, Controversi-ALE; Arbor Brewing, Ryeclops Ale; Short's Brew, Superfluid; Saugatuck Brewing, Starbust Wheat; Cranker's Brewery, Fifth Voyage Coconut Porter; Odd Side Ales, Citra Pale Ale; Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales, Saison X.

Contact Robert Allen at rallen@freepress.com or @rallenMI