Stocking Your Home Bar

Base Spirits

The foundation of a well stocked home bar, spirits provide the main building blocks of every cocktail. These four key spirits make a good starting point for a home bar, as they are the "base" or foundation of many excellent cocktails:

Vodka, Gin, Light Rum, Triple Sec

These spirits give access to over 50 cocktails listed here. Once you have these, adding any of the extra spirits or liqueurs will open up a whole range of new cocktails to mix.

The box on the right provides direct links to these base spirits at mix shake and pour's recommended online spirits supplier, TheDrinkShop.com.

Adding More Liqueurs and Spirits

With the four mix shake and pour base spirits in your bar, adding additional ingredients gives access to loads of new and delicious cocktails. Its obviously best to start with spirits or flavours you like the most, but we'd recommend a good berry liqueur such as Creme de Cassis or Black Raspberry Liqueur or a decent Bourbon as good candidates for expanding your range of accessible cocktails.

Other Essential Ingredients

While spirits often provide the basic character to a cocktail, a variety of other ingredients will be required. These are the other common ingredients that are always useful to have handy:

Sugar Syrup, Lime Juice, Lemon Juice, Cranberry Juice, Orange Juice, Apple Juice, Old Fashioned Bitters

Keep stocked up on these basics and add further fresh ingredients as needed.

More Thoughts on Stocking Your Bar

Simon Difford suggests starting with 13 core spirits in a strategy not completely dissimilar to the one suggested here by mix shake and pour. Difford lists Vodka, Gin, Rum, Tequila, Scotch, Cognac, Bourbon, Triple Sec, Grand Marnier, Apricot Brandy, Cassis, Sweet Vermouth and Dry Vermouth.

Robert "Drinkboy" Hess provides an alternative approach based around collecting the ingredients for your three favourite cocktails. In some cases not a bad idea but it really depends on what those three cocktails are! With very different ingredients, your options for expanding may not be great. If you take this approach, match your favourites to information on this site and in one of the Difford guides first to make sure you're leaving some good opportunities for expanding your cocktail repertoire. The ingredients section at the bottom of every mix shake and pour cocktail page provides a useful set of quick links for purchasing the ingredients needed for that cocktail (such as the ingredients list for the Bajan Passion cocktail).

Imbibe Magazine has a take on stocking the home bar, noting that good quality spirits can be obtained without paying top shelf prices.

The excellent eGullet website has a lengthy discussion and some excellent advice on selecting a ten bottle start up bar.

Wayne Curtis reports on an introductory cocktail session at the Museum of the American Cocktail which suggests starting lists of cocktails for beginners to tackle. He also provides an excellent quote from David Embury from the Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, which is too good not to repeat again here:

"The average host, who makes no pretense of being an expert on liquors, can get along very nicely with a knowledge of how to mix a half dozen good cocktails. In fact, if he can make only two or three and always makes them well he will stand much higher in the regard of his guests than will the indiscriminate chop-suey dispenser who throws together a little of everything that chances to be laying around loose with no regard whatsoever for the basic function to be performed by each ingredient."