How To Build a Home Bar

So you want a home bar? There's plenty of reasons for building one: saving money, being able to entertain guests, a nice addition to the kitchen or living room. Creating space for a home bar is easy but stocking it is where things get difficult, it may seem easy to run out and spend hundreds on bottles that are incredibly fancy or buying obscure liqueurs but there is a better way to do it. There's two main ways to approach this issue and below we will break them down. 

Necessities 

Sadly although we all love saving a dollar there are just some things that you can't skip out on. Luckily, most of these essentials are glasses and equipment so it will last a lifetime (as long as you have guests who don’t drop their glasses). The first section I will go into is glasses, there’s a small range of glasses that all perform slightly different functions and thus are used in different drinks. The amount of each glass that you buy is completely up to you but these are the types of glasses that are an absolute must have:

• Pint glass

• Wine glass (Make sure it has a stem, with a stemless glass your the heat from your hand warms your wine more quickly)

• Collins glass 

• Rocks glass 

• Hurricane glass 

Once you have some glasses there are some accessories that you will need to prepare the drinks that will eventually go into these glasses. Lots of stores and websites sell bartending sets which should contain everything that you need to get started (here is a Canadian website with a fantastic selection) , if you are buying everything individually or you want to make sure that the set you are looking at has everything you need make sure that the following are included:

• ½ Oz, 1 Oz, 2 Oz jigger 
• Cocktail shaker 
• Strainer
• Ice cube tray 
• Bottle opener
• Lemon/ lime squeezer 

Bottles

Okay now that you have all of the tools to prepare drinks it's time to stock your shelves. This is where people tend to go crazy and things get expensive, so relax and think rationally and save yourself some money. Now you’re probably in one of two camps: you have some drinks that you enjoy and you just want to be able to make those, or you don’t have a particular favorite and you want to try new things. If you know what drinks you like this will be much easier, if this is the case buy whatever bottles are needed to make your favorite drink and just like that your bar is complete. From this point you can just slowly add more bottles to your collection and by using the spirits and liqueurs that you already enjoy you will be able to find recipes similar to what you already like but with a couple of different ingredients. If you were in the second group of not having a favorite drink this is what to do, first buy one bottle (or even a mickey) of each of the four main spirits. Although it may seem tempting do not buy the cheapest bottle that you see for each, this alcohol will taste horrible and may leave you with a bad impression of something that you may actually like. My recommendations are Bulleit Bourbon (check out our old fashioned recipe), Hendricks Gin (check out our cucumber gimlet recipe), Vodcow (for vodka which we use in our cosmopolitan recipe), and Bacardi White Rum (which we use in a handful of our alcoholic slushies). By buying these all you need are a couple of non-alcoholic mixers and you will be able to make more drinks than you can count on your hands, you will be able to experiment and find out what you do and don’t like plus when you’re done with a bottle and you didn’t like that spirit you don’t have to replace it and you can just get some liqueurs that will let you make more cocktails with an alcohol you actually enjoy.

Once you have your bar stocked send in a picture of it to have it featured on our main page!