A drinking tracker and journal that never tells you to stop or cut down

I enjoy drinking. Especially a night out on the city with the boys, no plans and no clock. The problem is that one moment I’m fine and the next I’m wasted, and the wife has me sleeping in the doghouse. Was it something strong? Was it just one too many? Hard to tell after the fact.

What I wanted, while drinking, was to know where I was, where I was heading, and whether I could keep going or should cruise for a bit. Without doing math or staring at my phone instead of chilling with my friends. There are plenty of BAC calculators, but none that account for my body, what I’m actually drinking, how fast, whether I’ve eaten (in Japan, where I live, food and drinking go together), or whether the next one is gonna black me out. And almost everything else in the category is built around drinking less or quitting, which is definitely not my goal.

So I spent my free time building the tool I wanted. It turned into what I’d describe as a drinking companion and journal. I called it Nomicho (飲み帳, “drinking journal”).

While you drink. Log a drink in a couple of taps. Nomicho estimates your BAC through the whole session and describes it in words you’d actually use, like “feeling it” or “buzzed.” You can tell it more if you want: whether you’ve eaten, how long a drink took, where you are, photos of what’s in front of you. It also forecasts hangover severity, which I check when I have something on the next day.

The way I actually use it: I set a pace, like “buzzed,” and it tells me whether the next drink would take me past it. There’s a Live Activity so it’s all on my lock screen at a glance. It hasn’t made me drink less. It’s made me a lot better at ending the night the way I meant to, which keeps my wife happy and me out of the dog house.

Afterwards. Sessions stack up into a calendar, and you can open any night for a recap of how it went. For me, I can see a map of all the izakayas and karaoke bars I went, and a photo library of the night. I hand-built a set of insights that ended up telling me things about my own patterns I hadn’t noticed.

The collection. Every drink you log gets added to a stamp-book style collection. I hand-curated a lot of rare and unusual ones and gave them rarities. Habushu, the Okinawan awamori that often comes with a whole pit viper snake in the bottle, is a legendary one you can go hunting for.

It’s local-first, works with no account, no ads, no tracking, and you can export everything.

It was Japan-only for a while. I’ve just localized it and released it for the US on the iOS App Store: Nomicho

This is a passion project by someone who likes drinking, for people who like drinking. There’s a lot more use cases for it. I hope you find it useful if you decide to try it.

Stay thirsty.