It’s a lazy Sunday afternoon when you fancy a chilled cocktail but are too lazy to drive to a bar. Or it is a late Friday evening, and you want to watch a movie with your partner while enjoying a few drinks at home. In situations like this, you wish you had a fancy home bar.
A home bar can be a great opportunity to exercise your hosting skills and show off to your friends.
So, after you have decided to set up a bar at your home, we suggest these basic guidelines.
The first golden rule – go slow on stocking up
The first rule while setting up a bar is to work in an incremental approach instead of buying everything you can imagine.
Start out with basic glassware, essential alcohols, and mixers – mainly those you like to consume or make cocktails with. Buying fancy liquors and letting them live their lives on the shelf is only going to cost you a fortune with no real use.
Storing liquor
There are certain aspects related to setting up the storage for the liquor, such as space/area requirement, location inside the house, reusable furniture vs. the furniture to buy, proximity to the refrigerator, and your preference of having a wet bar or a dry bar.
The dimensions of your home bar should depend on the availability of the right location in your home. A location that is away from direct sunlight and close to a refrigerator should be fine. Best locations are those that are closer to the kitchen, particularly, in the case of a dry bar. If you prefer to have a wet bar, you should consider the plumbing arrangements you would need to make to install a sink in your bar. As for the furniture, you can choose from a nice looking shelf on the wall to a full-fledged cabinet with ample storage space to accommodate all the bar items.
There are a few essential requirements for your storage needs to be met. Have tall shelves to accommodate tall bottles, and ample top space to allow room for the glassware and some space for mixing drinks. Your home bar should have easy access to an electrical outlet for running an electrical blender or connect a refrigerator if needed.
Buying the barware
As mentioned earlier, you should consider buying only the essential equipment, to begin with. Here are the basic items you need to equip your bar with:
- Ice bag
- Bar spoon
- Muddler
- Jigger
- Corkscrew
- Citrus press
- Cocktail shaker
- Strainer
- Ice cube trays
Selecting the right glassware
You should choose your first glassware depending upon your own choice of drinks and cocktails instead of going overboard with collecting fancy glassware. A few short glasses, tall glasses and stems are enough to get you started. However, if you plan on hosting parties, you can also go for flutes or champagne glasses as well.
Another important thing about the glassware is how they are arranged in your home bar. They may play a crucial role in embellishing your bar but are fragile too. Therefore, place them on a shelf, which is not easily accessible by children but still makes your bar look chic and classy.
Filling your bar shelves
The most important part while setting up the bar is to fill it up with spirits, mixers, juices and sodas. While selecting all this, you should keep the golden rule in mind, i.e. choose only what you enjoy, first.
You should think and list down the spirits you enjoy directly, i.e. not as a cocktail. The next drinks to shortlist are your favourite cocktails. If you don’t know the recipes of your favourite cocktails, a good cocktail recipe book would be a great addition to your bar too. Look up the ingredients of your favourite ones and find out the mid-priced variants of the drinks unless you’re confident that the larger sums of money are worth spending.
A few common spirits that work well in several cocktail recipes are:
- Gin
- Bourbon whiskey
- Scotch whiskey
- Tequila
- White rum
- Dark rum
You should pay special attention to the way these spirits and the mixers are stored. For instance, for a fruit juice based cocktail, you should think of buying the tetra-packs of the juice before you host a party or plan to make the cocktail. Else, you might end up having a puffed pack of juice because of its limited shelf life. Similarly, for Irish Crème, it is better to buy it when you plan to use it to avoid gradual loss of its flavour.
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