How to stock your home bar

Your favorite drinks
Start off buying ingredients for you and your friends’ top three favorite cocktails.

Learn to really master your favorite drinks, experimenting with the ingredients and proportions to find your perfect match. This stock will most likely allow you to make another ten drinks; buying one more filler might increase your alternatives with yet another ten.

A bottle of each to go with the sweet and the sour
Certainly nothing wrong with having a bottle of each of the most common base spirits at home — for example Vodka, Rum, Gin, Whiskey and Brandy. Many people have a preferred base spirit. You can simply drink that on the rocks, or add freshly squeezed lemon and simple syrup to make a classic Sour.

If you keep in mind the proportions of base spirit, sweet and sour, you can quickly expand your repertoire just by adding an extra twist to the drinks you’ve mastered by trying liqueurs, herbs, fruits or juices as flavoring agents.

Before you know it, you’ll have a cabinet full of intriguing liqueurs – and since you’re becoming a master, yours won’t be half-full and covered in dust three years later…