Nine Bar started with a simple idea: keep track of the coffee you love so you can make it great again.
But the more I used the app, the more I realized that simply recording beans and brews wasn’t enough. A useful coffee journal should help answer the questions that come up when you’re actually standing in front of the espresso machine or deciding what to brew next.
Which beans do I have right now? Are they ready to brew? What did I make with this bag last time? What settings did I use?
That thinking shaped Nine Bar 1.1, the first major update to the app.
Version 1.1 introduces smarter bean tracking, a redesigned Home experience, more detailed brew logging, an easier way to add equipment, and Nine Bar Pro. Here’s what’s new.
Your Coffee Beans Change. Nine Bar Now Understands That.
One of my favorite additions in 1.1 is coffee freshness tracking.
Add a roast date and roast level to an In Stock bean, and Nine Bar can now show where that coffee is in its typical post-roast window:
Resting → Peak → Good → Past Peak
Instead of making you calculate how many days have passed since roasting, the status appears right alongside the rest of the bean’s information.
Tap it and Nine Bar explains the current status and the ranges being used to determine it.
It isn’t intended to tell you whether a coffee tastes good—that’s ultimately up to you. Instead, it provides another useful piece of context when deciding what to brew.
Because sometimes the bag you’ve been waiting to open may finally be entering its sweet spot.
A Better Beans Library
As my own collection of beans grew, I also found that a simple list wasn’t enough.
Version 1.1 reorganizes Beans into three sections:
In Stock, Wishlist, and Finished.
“In Stock” also replaces the previous “Active” terminology, which I think better describes the coffee that’s actually sitting on your shelf.
There’s now search and filtering, too. You can search across information such as the roaster, coffee name, origin, region, or variety and filter your collection using roast level, process, status, rating, and freshness.
It’s a relatively small change that becomes increasingly useful as your coffee history grows.
See What You’ve Actually Made With a Bean
Bean details have become more useful as well.
Nine Bar now includes Drinks You’ve Made, a summary generated from your actual brew history. Rather than asking you to categorize how you intend to use a coffee, Nine Bar looks at what you’ve really made with it.
Espresso. Cortado. Cappuccino. Pour-over.
The drinks you’ve brewed most appear first.
I like this approach because Nine Bar is meant to become more useful over time. Your brew history shouldn’t simply be a collection of old records—it should provide context for what you might want to make next.
You can also add an optional roaster or purchase link to a bean, making it easier to return to the coffee online if you want another bag. Nine Bar
Home Is Simpler
The Home screen received some attention in 1.1 as well.
Previously, information about your last brew and the option to log it again were visually separated. They’re now combined into a single Log Again card.
The bean, drink type, last-brewed context, previous brew information, and Log Again action all live together.
It’s a better representation of one of the core ideas behind Nine Bar:
You found a brew you liked. Now make it again.
Drink-type labels also appear throughout today’s logged brews, the Brews tab, and brew details, making it easier to understand your history at a glance.
Brew Logging Got Smarter
Version 1.1 includes quite a few smaller improvements to logging a brew. Milk is a good example.
Instead of relying entirely on free-form text, Milk Type now includes choices for Dairy, Oat, Almond, Soy, Coconut, Cashew, Macadamia, Pistachio, Pea, and Other. Choose Dairy and you can specify fat content; choose Other and you can still enter something custom.
Iced drinks behave more intelligently, too. When Served Iced is selected, Milk Temperature disappears because it no longer makes sense in that context.
Bean selection is smarter as well. Wishlist and Finished beans are excluded when choosing a coffee for a new brew, Quick Add is available directly from the picker, and search automatically becomes available when you have more than eight In Stock beans.
These aren’t headline features individually. Together, they make logging a drink feel noticeably more natural.
Adding Equipment Is Easier
Equipment setup has been reorganized around a question that makes more sense:
How do you brew?
Instead of starting with one long list of equipment types, Nine Bar now uses:
Brew Method → Equipment Type
Choose your brewing method first and Nine Bar narrows the equipment choices accordingly. When a method has only one applicable equipment type, Nine Bar selects it automatically.
Version 1.1 also expands the equipment catalog with the Manual Espresso Maker and Hario Switch equipment types, proper Turkish and Vietnamese Phin entries, the OutIn Fino grinder, and OutIn Nano and Mino espresso machines.
It’s another example of something I want to continue doing with Nine Bar: supporting the many different ways people actually make coffee rather than assuming everyone has the same setup.
Introducing Nine Bar Pro
Version 1.1 also marks an important step for the future of the app with the introduction of Nine Bar Pro. Nine Bar remains free to start.
The free version lets you track up to four beans across all statuses, one grinder, and two brew methods. For someone just getting started with coffee tracking, that’s enough to build a useful journal and experience the core app.
Nine Bar Pro removes those limits and unlocks the full Nine Bar experience, including paid capabilities such as optional account creation and cross-device sync.
Pro isn’t intended to turn the basic coffee journal into something you can’t use without paying. The goal is to let anyone start tracking coffee while giving enthusiasts who build larger bean libraries, use multiple pieces of equipment, or want more advanced capabilities room to grow.
It also gives me a sustainable way to continue developing Nine Bar. And there’s plenty more I want to build.
Lots of Small Improvements, Too
Not every change needs its own section.
Version 1.1 includes visual and usability refinements throughout the app, including a redesigned Beans tab icon, improvements to the Log Again presentation, corrected text clipping and nested-container styling, better labeling, and other small changes that make the experience feel more consistent.
Those details matter to me.
Nine Bar isn’t supposed to feel like a database with a coffee-themed interface wrapped around it. I want it to feel like a thoughtfully designed journal that happens to remember a lot about your coffee.
What’s Next
Nine Bar 1.1 is a much better representation of what I originally imagined the app becoming.
The first version established the foundation: beans, equipment, brews, and the ability to record what worked.
Version 1.1 starts connecting those pieces.
Your roast date can tell you something useful about your beans. Your brew history can tell you what you’ve made with them. Your last brew can become the starting point for the next one.
And that’s the direction I want Nine Bar to continue moving—not simply collecting more data, but making the data you already record more useful.
Because the goal hasn’t changed:
Find your nine. Then repeat it.
Nine Bar 1.1 is available now for iPhone.
