Drinking Buddy
v5.3. This Shortcut requires iOS/iPadOS 14.5 or greater.
Drinking buddy is a Shortcut for logging your drinks and monitoring your estimated Blood Alcohol Content over time.
Drinking buddy keeps a log in your iCloud Drive, where it’s as protected and private as anything else in your Apple account. This log is plain text, as are your personal settings.
Drinking Buddy calculates your BAC based on the Widmark Formula, which factors in your body weight, gender, and the time since your drink. There are many Widmark calculators out there, but I’ve never seen any that do the kind of cascading calculation that Drinking Buddy does. Drinking buddy does its best to estimate your current BAC based on all your recent drinks, and even shows you how long it will take for your BAC to go down to zero.
Of course, all of this is just an estimate, so please use Drinking Buddy for information and entertainment purposes only. Drink responsibly and don’t drive if you’ve been drinking.
Here are some things that Drinking Buddy can do:
Log your drinks now or later. You can tell Drinking Buddy how long it’s been since you finished the drink you’re logging, or even log a drink days later if you forgot in the moment.
When you launch Drinking Buddy, it shows your current BAC, how long it’s been since your last drink, and how many drinks you’ve had today.
If your BAC is greater than zero, Drinking Buddy shows how long it will be before you’re back to zero.
Since BAC numbers can be hard to read, Drinking Buddy shows your “drunkenness percentage.” A drunkenness percentage of 100% is equal to a BAC of .08, at which you're considered legally intoxicated in the United States.
Choose “Seven-Day Report” to see your drinks over the last seven days. This view shows a rolling average drinks-per-day, which is a number your doctor will ask you right before you lie.
View your entire log, or edit out mistaken entries.
“Hey Siri, I had a glass of wine.” Optionally log drinks with your voice.
Optionally log BAC estimates to the Health app.
Things to Know
You can log a drink when you start drinking it or when you finish, or any time in between.
On the main menu, beer, wine, cocktail, and liquor entries all count as the same: 14 grams of alcohol. The 1/2 drink counts as 7 grams. Custom drinks can vary in alcohol quantity.
Drinking Buddy uses pounds for body weight, not kilograms. Sorry world.
The seven-day report uses grams consumed to calculate the drink averages. So if you drink a high-ABV beer every day, expect your daily average to be more than one drink.
Changelog
To update Drinking Buddy, just delete it from your Shortcuts app and re-download it using the link above. Delete the DB BAC Calc Shortcut as well. Your log will remain safely stored on your iCloud Drive, so you won’t lose any data.
1.0 Drinking Buddy released!
1.1 Changed some copy.
1.2 Added a check/explain/link if DB BAC Calc is not found.
1.3 Took that a step further and now Drinking Buddy helps you install DB BAC Calc if it’s not there.
2.0 is a major release with many new features:
Fewer taps to log. Now when you launch Drinking Buddy, you can log a drink right away, and be done. This is made possible by using notifications instead of modal alerts in many interactions throughout the Shortcut.
A daily summary now appears at the top of the logging menu. If you haven’t had a drink today, yesterday’s summary is shown.
Welcome and Help are cleaned up and improved.
There’s a new feature to share your BAC report via a standard Share Sheet.
Many small improvements and refinements.
2.1 is the first release for iOS 13
Fixes a bug introduced by iOS 13 where an error would occur when the log has no drinks.
Cleaner menus.
Note: iOS 13 displays emoji in Shortcuts menu headers as gray outlines. So that sucks.
3.0 is a complete re-write. This version is not backwards compatible with previous versions; it creates new logs and settings. It does not delete any files from previous versions, or migrate any log entries.
No longer requires a second shortcut for calculating BAC.
Support for drinks with varying amounts of alcohol.
No longer interacts with the Health app at all.
Visual icon system for showing BAC.
New design, new icons, including dark mode support.
Log custom drinks by grams, ABV, or proof
Cocktail Calc for logging custom drinks with multiple ingredients.
A history of custom drinks is available for re-logging from the main menu.
Improved seven-day report
Archive older logged drinks to speed up logging
Log drinks with Siri
Numerous improvements and refinements and probably new bugs.
3.1 fixed a bug with the Siri Shortcuts looking for the wrong directory.
3.2 Health recording is back!
Under Settings and More, you can now toggle on and off Log BAC to Health.
Estimated BAC will only be recorded to the Health App when you log a drink for the current time.
When you log your first drink of the day, you will be asked if you want to create a zero BAC record for a time just before the logged drink.
You can also record a BAC entry at any time by choosing Log BAC to Health.
When you update your body weight, you’ll be asked if you want to update your body weight in the Health app as well.
Fixed another bug where the Wine Siri Shortcut was looking for the wrong folder.
5.0 What happened to 4.0? It was slow. Something happened with Shortcuts, and the CSV log parsing was getting so slow that Drinking Buddy was unusable.
So 5.0 uses a new JSON data structure. This means it create a new folder and a new log, so you’ll have to start fresh.
As a result, 5.0 is much faster!
There are also new Siri Shortcuts for logging drinks by voice.
If you have Custom Drinks from 3.x you can copy the file into the DB5 folder to preserve them.
Menu and icon redesign for iOS/iPadOS 14.
5.1 Minor fixes.
Seven-day report now looks much nicer as a multi-column menu rather than a Quick Look.
5.2 Minor fix to remove extraneous action.