Building the home bar
Before the bar was ‘the bar’, I used spend a lot of time in duty free contemplating the ideal home bar set up. Once you have some basic cocktail making kit (or a suitable array of kitchen utensils to act as sturdy substitutes) the main question revolved around which bottles you would need to be able to offer guests (and yours truly) a tantalising range of cocktails.
The obvious anchors are your speed rail staples: London dry gin, a versatile vodka, a blended scotch, bourbon and rye, white and gold rums, tequila, pisco and cognac. But that’s quite an outlay, even tax free! Then you have your modifiers to actually make these bases into drinks. Triple Sec, cordials, cherry brandy, herbal, nut and coffee liquers, as well as a range of vermouths, amaros and other fortified wines. Bitters! Shrubs! Tinctures and syrups. Cocktail books often make a stab at listing the essentials, but the essentials basically gets you to having a full bar at home.
Peer into any drinks cabinet this Christmas and you’re bound to find some crusting Grand Mariner, ageing Benedictine and unloved Angostura. We get a lot of requests like this; to assist in building up a home bar, but shy of just giving up a list of our speed rail and most used back bar bottles, it feels exhaustive and overwhelming. You may as well just come to the bar.
As a tonic, we’ve come up with something cute as an alternative. Introducing: our Equal Parts cocktail kits. We made these easy-to-use packs to introduce you to the fun of making killer, BTW quality cocktails at home. Each pack includes two well-chosen recipes made with equal parts, a sour and stirred down drink, utilising all the bottles in your chosen kit. All the products have been carefully vetted, look stunning and are fully endorsed by us here at the bar. That means ethical liquids from indies and smaller producers, cutting out the unnecessary sugar, additives, corn-syrup and high fructose.
Given that each recipe is built to equal parts, you can easily scale the amounts to fit your tastes and needs. This simple approach lets you use any measuring tools in your kitchen, helping you achieve impressive results every time you prepare a drink.
We have three packs out for Christmas - for GIN, BOURBON or MEZCAL lovers. Once you receive your box, you simply scan the QR code to join the members' area where you can access further information on each of your bottles and instructions on how to build your two selected drinks.
Bada bing.
