Why is it important to invest in a bar for the home? If you love playing host at parties, it would be cheaper in the long run to mix your own drinks rather than have a full bar catered each time. Moreover, you get to create your own environment to keep your guests thoroughly entertained.
Buy or Build Your Home Bar?
There are prefabricated bars that can easily be bought at large home depots, but if you are a hobbyist, you might want to make one on your own. Don’t depend on the carpenter to just build one without any specs. Since you’re the one who frequents bars, you should know what would work best.
Study the most ideal height, where the electrical sockets and sinks should be situated, and make sure that there’s leg room. You need to build for comfort – both for you, as the bartender, and your guests.
Stock up
Having a bar and a fridge filled to the brim with beer are two different things. The latter is what you had at university. Now that you have matured, so should your style of entertaining.
There are basic drinks and equipment you must invest in to start a decent bar. Make sure you have bottles of the most well-known stand-alone liquors. The essentials are bourbon or whiskey, a single-malt scotch, and vodka.
Then you have the so-called specialty items – Triple Sec, Amaretto, and brandy. Get small bottles for starters as you won’t be using them too often.
As for the gear, there are basic bartending kits available in specialty shops, large department stores, and even online. These may contain any or all of the following: basic cocktail glassware (brandy snifter, wineglasses, rocks or ‘old-fashioned’ glasses, champagne flutes, collins glasses, martini glasses, margarita glasses, highball or ‘straight’ glasses), a waiter’s corkscrew, a bar spoon, a cocktail shaker, a strainer, a double jigger, a muddler, a citrus squeezer, a champagne stopper, a paring knife, a bowl for ice, tongs, toothpicks, and cocktail napkins.
You’ll also eventually need mixers and garnishes, such as sugar, cocktail onions, brandied cherries, ginger ale, cola, lemon-lime soda, soda and tonic water, and a large bottle each of cranberry juice and orange juice. Stuff that should be fresh and bought at the last minute are limes, lemons, ice, and mint leaves.
Cocktail experts cringe at the thought of using bottled olives bought at the supermarket. For perfect martinis and other drinks, they recommend those purchased from an upscale deli. The best varieties are Green Lucque, Picholine, and Nicoise, but these are somewhat difficult to find.
The moves
The Internet is replete with recipes on mixed drinks, and you’d have to perfect the art by practicing. For instance, there’s a whole science to making the perfect martini – some say even James Bond’s shaken drink is an abomination – but that’s a whole other topic. You can discreetly hide a mixing list underneath the bar while you haven’t yet mastered the drinks by heart.
For now, try studying the moves. Don’t just stick the straw into the drink; throw it in the air with your right hand, let it flip once or twice, catch it with your left, and shoot it into the glass. Instead of just sticking in a lemon wedge, practice tossing it behind you with your right hand and over your left shoulder, catching it in the glass. You’ll be like Tom Cruise in the movie “Cocktail” in no time.